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Dessert

Ice Cream Cakes

A cake with a thick sugar icing, made from butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg whites, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Ice Cream Cakes

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

  2. Add the sweet milk, flour, and baking powder.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Divide the batter into jelly-cake pans and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

Make the icing

  1. For the icing, boil 8 cups of sugar with 1 cup of boiling water until it forms a thick syrup.

  2. Pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites while stirring until cool.

  3. Add citric acid and flavor with lemon or vanilla.

Assemble

  1. Spread the icing between and on top of the layers.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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, rich crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake's shape as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the layers rise and turn light.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they add lift and a light, airy texture.
White sugar
Sweetens the cake and, when boiled, forms the thick icing syrup.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup over the egg whites while stirring. The hot sugar syrup cooks the beaten whites into a stable, glossy icing. Pouring slowly while stirring keeps the whites from scrambling and helps the icing thicken as it cools.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, egg, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, egg, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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