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Dessert

Ice Cream Cake

A baked cake made with butter, powdered sugar, milk, flour, eggs, wine, and nutmeg, served with ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Ice Cream Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cream together the butter and powdered sugar.

  3. Add the milk, flour, and eggs, mixing well.

  4. Stir in the wine and grated nutmeg.

  5. Pour the batter into iron gem pans and bake until light and hollow in the center.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cooled, cut a round hole in the top of each cake.

  2. Fill the hole with ice cream just before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add richness and tender texture.
Eggs
Provide structure and help the cakes rise and set as they bake.
Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the cake's shape after baking.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and dissolves easily into the creamed butter.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter bake to a soft, tender crumb.

The step that matters

Bake until light and hollow in the center. Underbaked batter stays dense and may collapse once cooled, while the proper set keeps the cake hollow for the ice cream filling.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg, wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Tarragonfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg, wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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