Skip to main content
Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A light, fluffy cake with coconut topping, made from eggs, sugar, butter, milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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.

Prepare the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Beat the butter, sugar, and egg yolks together until creamy.

  3. Mix the baking soda into the milk and the cream of tartar into the flour.

  4. Add the egg whites to the mixture just before incorporating the flour.

  5. Pour the batter into jelly‑cake tins and bake until lightly browned.

Frost and assemble

  1. For the frosting, beat together the egg white, a little sugar, and water.

  2. Spread the frosting over the top of each cake.

  3. Sprinkle grated coconut mixed with sugar over the cakes.

  4. Stack the cakes on top of each other, finishing the top with frosting and coconut.

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

Eggs
Whites add lift and structure, while yolks enrich the crumb and add tenderness.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and a tender texture.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the creamed butter hold air for a light crumb.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas, helping the cake rise and brown.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid that stabilises the egg whites and helps the cake rise.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites before the flour. Whipped whites hold air that gives lift; folding them in gently just before the flour keeps that air from collapsing, so the cake rises well.

Swap the coconut

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

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

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

More white mountain cake recipes

Philadelphia 3 See all 115 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes