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Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A light, fluffy cake made with eggs, butter, milk, sugar, flour, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

White 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

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

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar in a large bowl.

  2. Add the beaten yolks of the eggs.

  3. Add the milk, mixing well.

  4. Gradually stir in the flour.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  6. Add the baking powder and mix until just combined.

Bake

  1. Divide the batter into two cake pans.

  2. Bake until golden.

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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten and folded in, give the cake its light structure.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds tenderness and richness to the crumb.
All-purpose flour
Its proteins form the gluten network that gives the cake its structure as it sets.
Granulated sugar
Creamed with butter it helps trap air and adds sweetness and gentle browning.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise and turn light.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour so the batter can set into a tender cake.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Beaten whites hold air that makes the cake light. Stirring vigorously knocks that air out, so folding gently keeps the batter airy and the cake from turning 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.

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