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Dessert

Pink and White Layer Cake

A light pink and white layered cake made with egg whites, butter, flour, cornflour, milk, sugar, baking powder, and flavored with fruit juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Pink and White Layer 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 stir in the cornflour, all-purpose flour, and baking powder.

  5. Add the flavouring essence and fold in the whipped egg whites.

  6. Divide the batter in half; color one half pink with fruit juice and cochineal.

Bake and assemble

  1. Pour each half into well-buttered small sandwich tins and bake until golden.

  2. Once cooled, layer the pink and white cakes alternately with your choice of filling.

  3. Ice the top layer and decorate with pink 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. 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

Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they trap air and give the cakes lightness and structure.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds tenderness, richness and a fine crumb.
Cornflour
Its fine starch softens the crumb, giving a tender, delicate texture.
All-purpose flour
Provides the gluten network that gives the cakes their main structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the layers rise.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, creamed with butter, helps trap air for a light texture.

The step that matters

Fold in the whipped egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the whites; vigorous stirring deflates the batter, leading to flatter, denser layers.

“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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