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Dessert

White Loaf Cake

A light, fluffy loaf cake made with butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, milk, egg whites, and extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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White Loaf Cake

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 ↓

White Loaf Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream butter until soft, then combine with sugar and cream until light and frothy, adding boiling water if necessary.

  2. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together three times, then add 5 tablespoons of this mixture to the creamed mixture and cream well.

  3. Add milk or water alternately with the remaining dry ingredients to the creamed mixture.

  4. Add extract and beat hard for 2 minutes, then carefully fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites without beating the mixture further.

Bake

  1. Bake in a greased and floured loaf pan, starting in a slow oven and gradually increasing the heat as the cake rises. Cover the cake for the first three-fourths of the baking time.

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.

  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. Milk + flourtop 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

White butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give a tender, rich crumb.
Fine granulated sugar
Creams with butter for lightness and adds sweetness and gentle browning.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it sets.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in to add lift and a light, airy texture.
Milk or water
Adds moisture and loosens the batter so it bakes evenly.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the heat to help the cake rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stiffly beaten whites hold the air that lifts the cake. Beating the batter after adding them knocks that air out, so the cake bakes up dense instead of light.

“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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