Skip to main content
Baking

Cocoanut Mountain Cake

A coconut cake with butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg whites, baking soda, almond essence, and coconut topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Almond and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,093 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Cocoanut Mountain 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.

Make the batter

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the milk and mix well.

  4. Gradually add the flour, mixing until smooth.

  5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with cream of tartar until stiff peaks form.

  6. Fold the egg whites into the batter gently.

  7. Add baking soda and essence of almond, mixing until combined.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into baking sheets and bake until golden.

  2. For the icing, beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add sugar until glossy.

  3. Ice each sheet of cake and sprinkle grated coconut over the top.

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. Almond + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they give the batter lift and an airy, light crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps trap air for a lighter texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour to form the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter's acidity to produce gas, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stirring the whipped egg whites too vigorously knocks out the air they hold, so the cake rises less and turns dense. Fold gently, just until no white streaks remain.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

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

You might also like

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes