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Baking

Pink and White Layer Cake

A layered cake with alternating pink and white layers, made from butter, sugar, milk, corn starch, flour, baking powder, egg whites, and orange filling.

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 and White Layer 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.

Prepare the batter

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

  2. Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the milk, corn-starch, flour, and baking powder. Mix the batter well.

  3. Beat the whites of 6 eggs until stiff. Fold the stiff egg whites into the batter.

  4. Separate enough batter to make two layers. Add fruit coloring to the separated batter.

Bake and make the filling

  1. Pour the batter into prepared pans. Bake the batter until golden.

  2. Beat the whites of 2 eggs until stiff. Add white sugar to the stiff egg whites. Add orange extract to the mixture.

Assemble and frost

  1. Place a white layer on the cake. Spread filling over the white layer.

  2. Place a pink layer on top. Spread filling over the pink layer.

  3. Repeat layering until all layers are stacked, finishing with a white layer on top. Frost the top of the cake with the remaining filling.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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 for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and stay moist.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake.
Corn-starch
Softens the crumb, giving a finer, more tender texture than flour alone.
Baking powder
Releases gas to make the layers rise and become light.
Whites of 6 eggs
Whipped to add air and lift, and set to add structure.

The step that matters

Fold the stiff egg whites into the batter. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites. Stirring hard deflates them, which leaves the layers dense instead of light.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, corn, 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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