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Dessert

Pond Lily Cake

A cake made with butter, sugar, egg whites, milk, flour, baking powder, flavored as desired.

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 ↓

Pond Lily Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together thoroughly.

  2. Add the beaten egg whites and beat the mixture for 5 minutes.

  3. Add the beaten whites of 2 more eggs and beat again.

  4. Add the beaten white of one more egg and beat for another 5 minutes.

  5. Stir in the milk gradually, ensuring the sugar dissolves.

  6. Add the flour and baking powder, mixing well.

Bake and frost

  1. Bake in a funnel pan or in 2 small loaf pans.

  2. Frost with boiled frosting.

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. Egg + flourtop 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

Egg whites
Whipped whites trap air and add structure, helping the cake rise and hold its shape.
Flour
Provides the starch and protein that set during baking to form the cake's structure.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, when creamed with butter, helps trap air for a lighter texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the cake rise and become lighter.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter so it bakes evenly.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly. Beating butter and sugar together traps tiny air pockets that expand in the oven and give the cake its lift. Stopping early leaves a dense crumb, while the later egg white additions must be gentle enough not to knock that air out.

“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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