Name: Snow Ball Cakes
Ingredients: angel food cake or bride's cake; boiled icing; lemon flavoring; candied ginger

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Snow Ball Cakes

Ingredients

angel food cake or bride's cake
boiled icing
lemon flavoring
candied ginger

Directions

Bake the angel food cake or bride's cake in small round gem pans.
Cover each cake with boiled icing flavored with lemon.
Place a piece of candied ginger in the center of each cake.
Cut the cakes into diamond shapes.

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.

Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,154 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Angel food cake: Provides a light, airy, tender base for the individual cakes.
Boiled icing: Adds sweetness and a soft, glossy coating over each cake.
Candied ginger: Adds a spicy, chewy accent at the center of each cake.

“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.