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Dessert

Bermuda Witches

A layered cake made with sliced pound cake, jelly, grated coconut, and garnished with myrtle sprigs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Guava and coconut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Bermuda Witches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake

  1. Slice the cake into pieces no thicker than 1/6 inch and remove the brown edges.

  2. Spread half of the slices with Guava jelly or your choice of jelly.

  3. Sprinkle grated coconut evenly over the jelly.

  4. Press the remaining cake slices on top and trim into a neat shape.

Serve

  1. If the slices are large, divide them and arrange them sloppily in the center of a dish on a flat, white napkin.

  2. Garnish with small sprigs of myrtle.

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. Guava + coconuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Guava + myrtletop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Coconut + myrtletop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

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

What each ingredient does

Cake
Provides the soft, porous base that holds the jelly and coconut layers together.
Guava jelly
Adds sweetness and a moist, sticky layer that binds the cake slices.
Grated coconut
Adds chewy texture and a mild sweet flavour between the cake layers.

Swap the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (guava, myrtle):

  1. Raspberryfits about as well
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against guava, myrtle. 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.

More bermuda witches recipes

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