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Dessert

Banana Cake

A moist cake made with bananas, sugar, butter, milk, eggs, flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Banana 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.

Prepare the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the sweet milk and eggs, mixing well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the baking soda, cream of tartar, and sifted flour.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.

Bake and assemble

  1. Divide the batter into three layers and bake until golden.

  2. Once cooled, slice bananas between each layer.

  3. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and spread whipped cream on the bananas.

  4. Frost the top with white frosting.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once its proteins set in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar to lift the layers.
Cream of tartar
Provides acidity that works with baking soda to help the cake rise.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.. Adding dry ingredients gradually and stirring only until smooth keeps the batter evenly mixed and limits gluten development, which helps prevent a tough, dense cake.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

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