Skip to main content
Dessert

Variegated Cakes

A layered cake with white, pink, and green batters, flavored with bitter almond, spinach juice, and optional pistachios.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Almond and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Variegated Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the milk, bitter almond flavoring, whipped egg whites, and flour; mix until combined.

  3. Divide the batter into three bowls.

Color the batter

  1. Extract spinach juice by bruising fresh spinach leaves in a muslin bag.

  2. Add a few drops of spinach juice to one bowl, cochineal to another, and leave the third bowl plain.

  3. If using, pound pistachio nuts and add to the green batter for enhanced flavor.

Layer and bake

  1. Grease small round pans or cups and add a little of each colored batter, stirring lightly as you add each color.

  2. Layer the white batter between the pink and green for a better visual effect.

  3. Bake until a toothpick inserted comes out clean, then ice the sides and top.

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. Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Spinach + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Almond + spinachtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together352 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cakes a light, fluffy crumb.
Powdered sugar
Creamed with butter to add sweetness and help create a tender texture.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in to add lift and structure to the batter.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a smooth consistency.

The step that matters

Stirring the colored batters lightly. Overmixing the batter after adding the colors can deflate the whipped egg whites and toughen the crumb, so the colors should be swirled in gently.

Swap the pistachio

The recipe marks pistachio as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, egg, flour, almond, spinach):

  1. Cashew nutfits about as well
  2. Pistachiothe original
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Hazelnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, egg, flour, almond, spinach. 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.

You might also like

Pistachio Ice CreamPistachio Ice Cream36 recipesAlmond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipesAlmond WafersAlmond Wafers22 recipes