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Dessert

Snow Cake

A light, frosted cake made with butter, flour, cornstarch, milk, baking powder, egg whites, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Snow 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 batter

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Add the flour and mix thoroughly.

  3. Stir in the cornstarch.

  4. Dissolve the baking powder in the milk and add it to the mixture.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites and sugar until well combined.

  6. Add flavoring to taste.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into baking sheets and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Cool and frost with white icing.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 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

Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air, giving the cake a light, airy structure as they set.
Baking powder
Releases gas when dissolved and heated, helping the cake rise.
Cornstarch
Lightens the crumb and gives the cake a tender, delicate texture.
Butter
Creaming with sugar adds fat that gives richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps stabilize the beaten egg whites.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites and sugar until well combined.. Folding gently keeps the air in the beaten egg whites. Overmixing deflates the foam, so the cake rises less and turns out 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.

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