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Cream Rose Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Rose Cake

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stir sweet cream with a pinch of baking soda.

  2. Cream butter with powdered sugar for 5 minutes until fluffy.

  3. Flavor with vanilla and alternately add flour and whipped egg whites.

  4. Color with cochineal, adding drop by drop until desired tint is achieved.

  5. Bake in four layers.

  6. For filling, mix grated coconut, whisked egg whites, powdered sugar, and rose water.

  7. Heap the filling between the layers of 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, sugar, flour, egg, rose. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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