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Dessert

Ice Cream Cake

A baked cake with a sweet cream filling made from sugar, butter, milk, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the cake

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the sweet milk, corn starch, flour, beaten egg whites, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. Mix well.

  4. Pour the batter into jelly pans and bake until golden.

Make the cream and assemble

  1. For the cream, pour boiling water over 3 cups of pulverized sugar and boil until it thickens.

  2. Pour the syrup over the beaten whites of 4 eggs and stir until cold and creamy.

  3. Add tartaric acid and flavor to taste.

  4. Spread the cream between the cakes and cover the top with the same.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Creams with the sugar to give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Corn starch
Softens the crumb by diluting the flour's gluten, giving a finer texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so baking soda releases gas, and helps stabilize the whites.
Eggs
Whites trap air and set during baking, adding structure and lightness to the cake and cream.

The step that matters

Stir the cream until cold and creamy. The hot syrup must cool while being beaten into the whites; stirring too early or too little leaves the cream runny or grainy and unable to hold its airy structure.

“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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