Skip to main content
Dessert

Perfection Cake

A light, fluffy cake made with egg whites, butter, sugar, flour, corn starch, milk, baking powder, and lemon or pineapple flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Perfection 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. Dissolve the corn starch in half of the milk.

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the egg whites and mix well.

  4. Stir in the dissolved corn starch and remaining milk.

  5. Add baking powder and flavoring.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until a toothpick comes out clean.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Egg whites
Add structure and help the cake hold its rise.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Creamed with butter, it sweetens and helps tenderize the crumb.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together.
Corn starch
Softens the crumb, making the cake more tender than flour alone.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cake to rise.

The step that matters

Add baking powder and flavoring.. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it gets wet and meets the batter. Once it is added, the batter should go into the pan and into the oven promptly, so the bubbles are trapped and the cake rises well rather than falling flat.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More pineapple cake recipes

Filling 4 See all 45 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipes