Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Cake

A light, almond-flavored cake made with eggs, butter, sugar, arrowroot, flour, and blanched almonds.

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

Why it works: Arrowroot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Snow 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

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

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs until fluffy.

Make the batter

  1. Gradually add the butter and sugar, mixing well.

  2. Fold in the arrowroot and flour gently.

  3. Add almond essence to taste.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared cake pan.

  2. Sprinkle the whole almonds on top before baking.

  3. Bake for about 30-40 minutes or until golden brown.

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. Arrowroot + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + flourtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together525 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Beaten until fluffy, they trap air and give the cake its light structure.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when creamed with the butter.
Arrowroot
A starch that keeps the crumb tender and fine-textured.
Flour
Provides the main structure that sets as the cake bakes.

The step that matters

Fold in the arrowroot and flour gently. Overmixing once the flour is added develops gluten and deflates the air beaten into the eggs, leading to a dense, tough cake instead of a light one.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Shallotfits less well
  4. Chivefits less well

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

Arrowroot PuddingArrowroot Pudding46 recipesAlmond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipesAlmond WafersAlmond Wafers22 recipes