Skip to main content
Dessert

Pyramid Pound Cake

A butter and egg pound cake baked into a pyramid shape, sliced into rectangular pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Pyramid Pound 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 until smooth.

  3. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Pour the batter into a dripping pan, spreading it to 1 inch thick.

  5. Bake until golden and a toothpick comes out clean.

  6. Let the cake cool completely before cutting it into pieces 3½ inches long and 2 inches wide.

Decorate and serve

  1. Frost the top and sides of the cake.

  2. Arrange the pieces in a pyramid shape on a cake stand, starting with 5 pieces in a circle with spaces between them.

  3. Layer 5 more pieces over the spaces, gradually narrowing the shape, and top with a bouquet of flowers.

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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar-free air to give the cake a tender, rich crumb and flavor.
Eggs
Provide structure and richness, helping the batter set and hold its shape as it bakes.

The step that matters

Bake until golden and a toothpick comes out clean. Baking to a clean toothpick test ensures the centre has set. Underbaked cake stays wet and can collapse when cut and stacked into a pyramid.

“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

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