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Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A layered cake made with butter, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add half of the milk and mix well.

  3. Sift the flour and baking powder together.

  4. Add part of the sifted mixture to the batter.

  5. Add the remaining milk.

  6. Add the rest of the flour.

Bake and assemble

  1. Fold in the egg whites.

  2. Bake the layers.

  3. Add raisins, currants, and spices to taste.

  4. Assemble the layers with frosting.

Sifting note

  1. Sift the flour and sugar 2 or 3 times before measuring.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Egg whites
Trap air when beaten, lightening the batter and helping the layers rise and set.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake, softens the crumb, and helps the surface brown.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, causing the batter to rise.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour and dissolves the sugar.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites. Egg whites hold air only while their foam is intact. Stirring vigorously or overmixing deflates the foam, so the layers bake up dense rather than light. Fold gently, just until no white streaks remain.

“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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