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Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A light, fluffy cake with coconut topping, made from powdered sugar, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, egg whites, and a sweet icing.

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 ↓

White Mountain 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 together the powdered sugar and softened butter, then add the sweet milk and mix well.

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

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

  5. Pour the batter into greased jelly tins and bake until golden.

Make the icing and assemble

  1. For the icing, boil the water and 3 cups of sugar until thick.

  2. Slowly pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites and beat until cool.

  3. Spread the icing between the layers of cake and sprinkle each layer with grated coconut.

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. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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 fat and richness, giving the cake a tender crumb and flavour.
Egg whites
Folded in whipped, they add structure and lightness to the batter.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set on baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cake rise and become light.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and, as it cooks into syrup, helps give it a thick, glossy body.

The step that matters

Slowly pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites. Pouring the hot syrup in a thin stream while beating cooks the egg whites into a stable, glossy meringue icing. Adding it too fast can deflate the whites or leave lumps of cooked egg.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, flour, egg. 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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