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Dessert

Other Layer Cakes

A layered cake with coconut and pineapple, made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, orange essence, and a coconut‑pineapple filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Other Layer 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 layers

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream together butter and sugar in a dish.

  3. Add egg yolks, cream, flour, Royal Baking Powder, essence of orange, and egg whites.

  4. Pour batter into small jelly-cake pans to form 3 layers.

Make the filling

  1. Boil water in a saucepan for the filling.

  2. Mix corn-starch with a little water.

  3. Stir the mixture into the boiling water and cook until thickened.

  4. Cream together sugar and butter in a separate bowl.

  5. Mix the mixture with the corn-starch.

  6. Set aside to cool.

  7. Beat egg yolk with a little sugar and stir it into the mixture.

  8. Stir in grated coconut and grated pineapple.

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. Corn + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  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. Orange + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Orange + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake layers together as they bake.
Royal baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the layers rise and become light.
Egg whites
Trap air in the batter, adding lift and a light, tender crumb.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the cake and the filling.
Corn-starch
Thickens the boiled water into a spreadable filling as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter and the filling.

The step that matters

Cook the corn-starch until thickened. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the mixture is heated until it boils. Stopping early leaves the filling thin and tasting of raw starch.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream, flour, corn, coconut. 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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