Name: Bermuda Witches
Ingredients: Savoy cake or pound cake, sliced ⅙ inch thick; Guava jelly or high-quality strawberry, raspberry, or currant jelly; Fresh coconut, grated

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

Savoy cake or pound cake, sliced ⅙ inch thick
Guava jelly or high-quality strawberry, raspberry, or currant jelly
Fresh coconut, grated

Directions

Prepare the cake

Slice the cake into pieces no thicker than ⅙ inch.
Remove the brown edges from the cake slices.

Assemble

Spread half of the slices with Guava jelly or your choice of jelly.
Sprinkle grated coconut evenly over the jelly.
Top with the remaining cake slices, pressing down lightly.

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.

Guava + coconuttop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Savoy cake or pound cake: Forms the layers, giving a soft, sturdy base that holds the jelly and coconut.
Guava jelly: Adds sweetness and moisture, and its firmness helps the layers stick together.
Fresh coconut: Adds chewy texture and a toasty, sweet flavor between the cake 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.