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Dessert

Ice Cream Cake

A layered cake with butter, sugar, flour, corn starch, egg whites, and icing made from boiled sugar syrup and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ice Cream 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 cake

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

  2. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Gradually add the corn starch and flour while stirring. Mix the baking powder with the flour before adding.

  4. Bake in layers until golden.

Make the icing

  1. For the icing, beat the egg whites until light.

  2. Boil the sugar with boiling water until clear and thick.

  3. Slowly pour the syrup over the beaten egg whites while stirring.

  4. Dissolve citric acid and add it to the icing, or flavor with almond or vanilla.

Assemble

  1. Spread the icing between the layers or on top after it cools.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Corn + almondtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together485 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Beaten into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake layers together.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to add tenderness and richness to the cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled into syrup, helps set the icing.
Corn starch
Softens the crumb, giving the cake a more tender texture than flour alone.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.

The step that matters

Pour the hot syrup slowly over the egg whites. Pouring the boiling syrup in a thin, steady stream while whisking cooks the egg whites gently and keeps the icing smooth and glossy instead of lumpy or deflated.

“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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