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Dessert

Delicious Corn Starch Cake

A sweet cake made with corn starch, flour, butter, powdered sugar, milk, egg whites, baking soda, and flavored with lemon or rose.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Delicious Corn Starch 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

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

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in the sweet milk and add to the mixture.

  3. Gradually add the egg whites and flour, mixing until fully combined.

  4. Add the cream of tartar and baking soda mixed with the flour.

  5. Flavor with lemon or rose as desired.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan and bake until golden.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

Egg whites
Whipped or beaten whites trap air, giving the cake lift and an airy crumb.
Corn starch
Starch softens the crumb, giving a finer, more tender texture than flour alone.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Butter
Fat adds richness and a tender texture to the crumb.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and stabilizes the egg whites, helping them hold volume.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to release gas, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Adding the cream of tartar and baking soda. Baking soda needs an acid to react and release gas. Mixing it evenly into the flour before adding it to the batter keeps the rise even and avoids pale or bitter pockets.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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