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Dessert

Lily Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, sweet milk, flour, baking soda, corn starch, cream of tartar, egg whites, and frosted with chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Lily 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 batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, combine the baking soda, corn starch, flour, and cream of tartar.

  4. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.

  5. Fold in the egg whites gently until fully incorporated.

Bake and frost

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. Let cool and frost with chocolate frosting.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Cream + chocolatetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs (whites)
Whipped whites trap air and give the cake lift and a light, airy crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and adds richness and tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a fine, tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter to stabilise the egg whites and support a finer crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to release gas that helps the cake rise.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites gently. Whites hold air only when they are whipped; stirring them vigorously deflates the foam and leaves a dense cake. Folding keeps the air in the batter so it rises well in the oven.

“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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