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Dessert

Pineapple Layer Cake

A layered cake with pineapple, sugar, whipped cream, and plain icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Pineapple Layer Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pineapple

  1. Cut the pineapple into small slices and mix with sugar in a covered dish to draw out juice.

  2. Stew the pineapple in the sugar and its juice until soft.

  3. Mash the stewed pineapple into a marmalade consistency.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

Fill and finish

  1. Once cool, mix the pineapple with the whipped cream.

  2. Fill the cake layers with the pineapple and cream mixture.

  3. Ice the cake with plain icing and decorate with candied pineapple if desired.

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

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

  2. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pineapple + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Provides the fruity filling and its juice sweetens and softens as it stews.
Sugar
Draws out juice from the pineapple and adds sweetness to the filling.
Whipped cream
Adds moisture and a soft, creamy texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Let the stewed pineapple cool before adding the cream. Whipped cream is made of fat and air bubbles that collapse and turn runny when warm, so the pineapple mixture must be cool before it is folded in to keep the filling thick and stable.

Swap the pineapple

The recipe marks pineapple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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