Skip to main content
Dessert

Walnut Cake

A cake made with egg yolks, sugar, coffee, vanilla, lemon, nuts, and a filling of yolks, sugar, cream, cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,293 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Walnut 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.

Make the cake batter

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

  2. Beat the egg yolks lightly with the sugar.

  3. Add the ground coffee, vanilla, lemon juice, and grated nuts, mixing well.

  4. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the yolk mixture.

Bake and fill

  1. Divide the batter into two layers and bake for 25-30 minutes.

  2. Beat the filling egg yolks with sugar, cream, and cornstarch until smooth. Cook the mixture in a double boiler until thick, then cool.

  3. Add vanilla and the reserved nuts to the filling. Spread the filling between the baked layers.

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. Beans + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Coffee + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,391 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the batter and add richness and colour to the cake.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they give the batter lift and an airy structure.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps stabilise the beaten yolks.
Grated nuts
Provide the main body, flavour and tender crumb of the cake.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cooked filling so it sets smooth and spreadable.

The step that matters

Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the yolk mixture. Whipped egg whites trap air that gives the cake its rise. Stirring or deflating them vigorously knocks out that air, leaving a dense layer.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, coffee, beans, vanilla, nuts, cream):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, coffee, beans, vanilla, nuts, cream. 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.

More walnut cake recipes

Chocolate 9Date 7Filling 7English 6Raisin 4Sour Cream 3 See all 162 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesVanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes