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Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A light cake made with sugar, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, egg whites, and topped with coconut icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

White Mountain Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  4. Sift together the flour and baking powder.

  5. Add the sifted flour and baking powder to the mixture.

  6. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  7. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter.

  8. Pour the batter into jelly tins.

Bake and ice

  1. Bake the batter until golden.

  2. Boil the water and sugar until thick.

  3. Slowly pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites.

  4. Beat the mixture until cool.

  5. Layer the cake with icing.

  6. Sprinkle each layer with grated coconut.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Beaten to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and give it structure as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, cooked into syrup, forms the thick icing.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and softness to the batter.

The step that matters

Slowly pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites. Pouring the syrup in a thin, steady stream while beating keeps the whites from deflating or cooking into lumps. The hot syrup partly cooks the egg proteins, which stabilises the icing.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, cream, milk, flour, egg. 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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