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Dessert

Bermuda Witches

A layered savoy cake dessert with jelly and grated coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 Savoy cake into pieces no thicker than ⅙ inch.

  2. Remove the brown edges from the slices.

  3. Trim the edges for a neat appearance.

Assemble

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

  2. Sprinkle grated coconut over the jelly.

  3. Press the remaining slices on top to form a complete cake.

  4. Arrange the slices in a dish, leaning them slightly in the center.

  5. 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Savoy cake
Forms the light, spongy base layers of the dish.
Guava jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity flavor, and helps the layers stick together.
Fresh coconut
Adds texture and a mild, 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.

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