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Dessert

Ice Cream Cake

A cake made with butter, flour, sugar, vanilla, milk, egg whites, baking powder, and boiled sugar icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. 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 cake

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

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

  4. Sift in the baking powder with the remaining flour and mix until combined. Flavor the batter with vanilla extract.

  5. Pour the batter into jelly tins and bake until golden.

Make the icing and assemble

  1. For the icing, pour boiling water over 3 cups of sugar and boil slowly until it can form a string.

  2. While hot, pour the syrup over 3 beaten egg whites and stir until it begins to cool.

  3. Spread the icing on top and between the layers of the cake.

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. Vanilla + milktop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

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

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Flour
Forms the batter's structure as it sets in the oven.
Egg whites
Whipped into the icing to give it a light, airy foam.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and turns light.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add tenderness and richness.
White sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled with water, forms the icing syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the icing syrup to the string stage. If the sugar syrup is under-boiled it stays too thin to set the icing, and if over-boiled it turns stiff and grainy. Pouring it hot onto the beaten whites lets the syrup cook the egg proteins slightly and firm into a glossy icing.

Swap the vanilla

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

  1. Vanillathe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

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