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Dessert

Snow Cake

A light cake made from beaten egg whites, powdered sugar, flour, baking powder, and flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Sift powdered sugar over beaten egg whites and stir well.

  3. Gently fold in flour mixed with baking powder.

  4. Add lemon or vanilla extract for flavor.

Bake

  1. Pour batter into greased cake pan and bake until golden.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 into stiff peaks, they trap air that gives the cake its light, airy structure.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and dissolves easily into the whipped whites, helping keep them stable.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and protein that set the structure of the cake as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the cake rise and become tender.

The step that matters

Folding in the flour and baking powder. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the egg whites. Stirring vigorously would deflate the foam and produce a dense, flat cake.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

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