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Dessert

Banana Cake

A moist cake made with bananas, eggs, flour, sugar, butter, milk, baking powder, and frosted with beaten egg whites and powdered sugar.

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 ↓

Banana 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. Beat the sugar and eggs together until thick.

  3. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder, then add them with the milk.

  4. Melt the butter gently and stir it into the batter.

Bake and assemble

  1. Pour the batter into layer pans and bake until golden.

  2. Once cooled, cover one layer with sliced bananas and a layer of frosting made by beating the egg whites with powdered sugar until smooth.

  3. Reserve half of the frosting to cover the top layer of the cake.

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. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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
Add structure and richness, and help bind the batter together.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, softens the crumb, and helps the surface brown.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender texture and rich flavor.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Bananas
Add moisture, sweetness, and banana flavor to the layer.

The step that matters

Bake the layers until golden. Baking sets the batter's structure while keeping moisture in. Removing the layers too late dries the crumb, while too early leaves the centre gummy and unset.

Swap the banana

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

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

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