Skip to main content
Dessert

Vanity Cake

A light cake made with sugar, butter, milk, flour, corn starch, baking powder, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Vanity Cake

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 ↓

Vanity Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the milk.

  3. Mix in the flour and baking powder sifted together with the corn starch.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  5. Beat all the ingredients together well.

  6. Flavor to taste.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake in two layers.

  2. Add your choice of frosting between the layers.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 main structure that holds the cake together.
Egg whites
Trap air when beaten, giving the cake lightness and lift.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.
Sugar
Creaming with butter adds sweetness and helps create a tender texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the layers rise.
Corn starch
Mixed with the flour to soften the crumb and make it more delicate.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the egg whites, which gives the cake its light texture. Stirring hard would deflate the foam and make the layers dense.

“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.

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes