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Dessert

Rocky Mountain Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, milk, baking powder, salt, and optional flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Rocky Mountain Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add your chosen flavoring and the well-beaten eggs.

  3. Mix in part of the flour with the salt and baking powder sifted into it.

  4. Add the milk and the remaining flour, then beat thoroughly for 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake in gem pans or your preferred baking dish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Flour
Forms the cake's main structure as its proteins set during baking.
Eggs
Add structure, richness and moisture, and help bind the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps tenderize it when creamed with butter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to help the cake rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a smooth, pourable batter.

The step that matters

Beating the batter after adding the milk and remaining flour. Once flour is mixed with liquid, gluten begins to develop. Beating for a long time makes it stronger, which can make the cake tough and dense rather than light.

“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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