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Dessert

Snow Cake

A light, fluffy cake made with arrowroot, butter, sugar, eggs, egg whites, cream, and almond flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 your oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

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

  2. Add the whole eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  4. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the butter mixture.

  5. Sift the arrowroot and fold it into the mixture along with the cream and almond flavoring.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for about 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Provides a light, tender crumb with a fine, delicate structure.
Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and adds richness and tenderness.
Castor sugar
Creams with butter to aerate the batter and adds sweetness and browning.
Eggs
Add structure and binding, and the whites add lift when beaten.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and help it rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stirring too hard deflates the air trapped in the whipped whites, leaving a dense cake. Fold gently with a spatula, cutting through and turning the batter, until no white streaks remain.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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.

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