Name: Snow Balls
Ingredients: angel food cake (baked in two square tins); thick white icing; long shredded coconut; butter (for greasing paper)

Why it works: Coconut and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Snow Balls

Ingredients

angel food cake (baked in two square tins)
thick white icing
long shredded coconut
butter (for greasing paper)

Directions

Prepare the cake

Bake an angel food cake in two square tins until about 2 inches thick.
Let the cake cool, then divide each cake into 16 parts.
Remove any brown parts and clip the corners of each piece.

Coat and set

Using two skewers, roll each piece in thick white icing, then roll each piece in long shredded coconut.
Place the finished balls on buttered paper.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Angel food cake: Forms the soft, airy base that each snow ball is built from.
Thick white icing: Adds sweetness and a moist, sticky layer that holds the coconut in place.
Long shredded coconut: Gives the outer layer a light, chewy texture and a clean white look.

“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.