Skip to main content
Dessert

Holiday Cake

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

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 ↓

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

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

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

  4. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture alternately with the sweet milk, mixing well.

  5. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the batter along with your chosen essence.

Bake and frost

  1. Pour the batter into greased pans measuring 12 inches by 8 inches.

  2. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

  3. For the frosting, beat together the fine sifted sugar, egg whites, and essence until smooth.

  4. Layer the cooled cakes with frosting in between, trimming the edges as needed.

  5. Cut the cake into pieces measuring 4 inches by 3 inches.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, fine-textured crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light, airy texture when creamed with butter.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks and folded in, they add lift and an airy structure to the batter.
Flour
Provides the main structure that sets as the cake bakes.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes whipped egg whites and works with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic components to produce gas that helps the cake rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stiff whites hold the air that lifts the batter. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring vigorously deflates the foam and produces a denser cake.

“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.

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes