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Dessert

Snowball Cake

A light cake with butter, sugar, flour, milk, lemon flavoring, egg whites, and thin citron slices.

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

Snowball Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Gradually add the sweet milk, stirring well.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Sift the baking powder into 1 cup of flour and stir it in slowly.

  5. Add the sliced citron and lemon flavoring.

  6. Add enough additional flour to make the batter as stiff as plain cake.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan and bake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 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
Whipped to stiff foam, they trap air that lightens the cake's crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise in the loaf pan.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter as the cake bakes.
Sugar
Creamed with butter, it sweetens the cake and helps give a fine, tender texture.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stiff whites hold air that makes the cake light. Folding gently, rather than stirring, keeps that air in the batter so the cake rises well instead of turning dense.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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