Skip to main content
Dessert

White Cake

A light white cake with a brown sugar cream filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
White Cake

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

White 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 cake

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

  2. In a large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the cold water and mix well.

  4. Gradually add the flour and baking powder, mixing until smooth.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites and flavoring.

  6. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, combine brown sugar and cream in a saucepan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add butter and beat until cool.

  4. If the mixture is too thick, add more cream.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

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

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

Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it become tender and light when creamed with butter.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and traps air when creamed with sugar.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Egg whites
Beaten stiff, they add air and lift that help the cake rise and set.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises in the oven.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact; stirring or deflating them makes the cake rise less and turn denser.

“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.

More white cake recipes

Egg 9Icing 8Plain 6Warsaw 5Almond 3Coconut 3 See all 331 →

You might also like

Pound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipesTapioca PuddingTapioca Pudding317 recipes