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Dessert

Pink Marble Cake

A pink marble cake made with butter, sugar, sweet milk, flour, egg whites, baking powder, and colored with cochineal, alum, cream tartar, soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Pink Marble 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the batter

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

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

  3. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  4. Sift the flour with the baking powder and gradually add it to the mixture.

  5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and fold them into the batter.

Color and marble

  1. To prepare the coloring, dissolve one of the coloring powders in ⅓ cup of boiling water.

  2. Stir the dissolved coloring into one-third of the cake mixture.

  3. Pour the plain batter and the colored batter into the prepared cake pan, swirling them together to create a marbled effect.

Bake

  1. Bake for about 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Adds richness and tenderness, and carries flavor through the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, traps air that lightens the texture.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they add lift and help set the cake's structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, causing the batter to rise and become airy.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and helps form a smooth, tender batter.

The step that matters

Swirling the colored and plain batters. Use only a few gentle swirls. Over-mixing blends the colored batter fully into the plain, turning the whole cake an even pink instead of marbled, and can knock air out of the egg-white batter.

“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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