Skip to main content
Dessert

Cocoanut Mountain Cake

A layered cake made with flour, milk, sugar, eggs, baking powder, coconut, lemon juice, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and coconut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,648 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. 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.

Prepare the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, mix 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1 cup sweet milk, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups all-purpose flour, 4 eggs, and 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder until smooth.

  3. Divide the batter into three or four layers and bake until golden.

Make the coconut filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine the grated coconut, juice of 2 lemons, 1 cup fine sugar, and the beaten white of 1 egg.

  2. Heat the mixture over low heat until the sugar dissolves.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture over the baked layers, reserving some coconut to top the final layer.

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. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

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

  2. Coconut + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and give the layers structure as they set in the oven.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cake layers their structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the layers rise and turn light.
Sugar
Sweetens the layers and helps them brown as they bake.
Grated coconut
Adds moisture, chewy texture and sweet coconut flavor to the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet coconut filling.

The step that matters

Heat the coconut mixture over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Gentle heat dissolves the sugar without scorching the coconut or cooking the egg white too quickly, keeping the filling smooth and spreadable.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, sugar, egg, lemon. 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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes