Skip to main content
Dessert

Potato Caramel Cake

A cake made with butter, sugar, flour, mashed potato, sweet milk, eggs, baking powder, chocolate, walnuts, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Potato Caramel Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter, sugar, and egg yolks together.

  2. Add the sweet milk, mashed potato, spices, and melted or grated chocolate.

  3. Sift the baking powder into the flour.

  4. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth and stir the sifted flour into the batter.

Finish and fill the tins

  1. Fold in the beaten egg whites and add the walnuts just before pouring into the cake tins.

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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Chocolate + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  4. Potato + walnuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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
Yolks help enrich the batter, and whipped whites add lift and a light crumb.
Mashed potato
Adds moisture and a tender, soft crumb to the cake.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cake rise.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while baking.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Whites whipped to a stiff froth trap air that gives the cake lift. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring vigorously deflates the batter and leaves a denser cake.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

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

You might also like

Chocolate CreamChocolate Cream171 recipesDeep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesChocolate CookiesChocolate Cookies76 recipes