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Dessert

Snowball Cake

A light cake made with butter, sugar, flour, milk, egg whites, citron, and lemon flavoring.

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 ↓

Snowball Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Gradually add the milk, stirring well.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture.

  4. Sift the baking powder into the flour, then stir the baking powder into the flour slowly.

  5. Add the citron and lemon flavoring.

  6. Add enough more flour to make the batter nearly as stiff as plain cake.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan.

  2. Bake.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Beaten until stiff and folded in to lighten the batter and help it rise.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the cake rise and become light.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
White sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when creamed with butter.

The step that matters

Add enough more flour to make the batter nearly as stiff as plain cake.. The batter must be stiff enough to hold its shape and support the whipped egg whites. If it is too thin, the cake may sink or bake dense and flat.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, flour, milk, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, milk, egg. 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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