Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Cake

A light, airy cake made with butter, flour, cornstarch, sweet milk, baking powder, egg whites, and sugar.

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

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 ↓

Snow Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Add the flour and mix thoroughly.

  3. Stir in the cornstarch.

  4. Dissolve the baking powder in the sweet milk and add to the mixture.

Add the egg whites

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold in the sugar.

  2. Gently combine the egg whites with the batter.

  3. Flavor to taste and pour into baking sheets.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake until golden.

  2. Cool before icing.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Cornstarch
Softens the flour's gluten, producing a finer, more delicate and tender crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they add lift and an airy, light texture.

The step that matters

Gently combine the egg whites with the batter. Whipped egg white foam traps the air that makes this cake light. Folding gently preserves that air; vigorous stirring deflates the foam and leads to a dense, heavy 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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes