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Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A lemon-flavored cake with coconut icing made from butter, sugar, egg whites, milk, flour, baking soda, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

White Mountain 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. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the egg whites and mix well.

  4. Dissolve the cream of tartar in the milk and add to the mixture.

  5. Sift the baking soda into the flour and gradually add to the batter.

  6. Flavor with lemon and mix until combined.

  7. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the icing and assemble

  1. For the icing, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gradually add the powdered sugar and mix until smooth.

  3. Fold in the grated coconut and flavor with lemon.

  4. Spread the icing between the layers and on top of the cake.

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

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

  5. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Whip and set to give the cake structure and a light, airy texture.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the whipped egg whites, helping them hold their volume.
Baking soda
Reacts with acid in the batter to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure as its proteins set during baking.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the icing and gives it a smooth, spreadable body.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Cream of tartar helps whites hold their foam, but any trace of fat or yolk prevents full whipping. Under-beaten whites collapse, and over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy, so the icing and cake lose volume.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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