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Spongecakes with Apple Snow

Sponge cakes topped with a frothy apple mixture soaked in cream and flavored with brandy or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Spongecakes with Apple Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the cakes

  1. Place the spongecakes in a glass dish.

  2. Stir the flavoring into the cream and pour it over the cakes. Let the cakes soak for 2-3 hours.

Make the apple snow

  1. Roast the apples until soft, then remove the skin and core.

  2. Mash the apples and mix with the sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Whisk the egg whites until frothy and fold into the apple mixture.

Serve

  1. Spread the apple snow over the soaked cakes and serve.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Brandy + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Cream + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Brandy + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whisked to foam and folded in, they lighten the apple mixture into a airy, fluffy snow.
Apples
Roasted and mashed, they form the soft, sweet pulp that makes up the snow.
Cream
Soaks into the spongecakes, adding moisture and richness to the base.
Spongecakes
Absorb the flavored cream, becoming soft and moist as the base layer.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the apple mixture and balances the tartness of the apples and lemon.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Egg whites hold air only while whisked to foam; folding them in gently keeps the mixture light, while overmixing deflates it and makes the snow dense.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, brandy, apple, sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, brandy, apple, sugar, 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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