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Dessert

Mikado Cake

A layered cake with butter, sugar, flour, corn starch, baking soda, cream of tartar, egg whites, egg yolks, raisins, hickory nuts, and a syrup filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mikado 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

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

  2. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  3. Add the water, then mix in the corn starch and flour sifted with the baking soda and cream of tartar.

  4. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites until combined.

  5. Divide the batter into three layers and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil the sugar and water until it forms a syrup that threads.

  2. Pour the syrup over the beaten egg yolks, raisins, hickory nuts, and salt, stirring well.

  3. Ensure the raisins are plump and of good quality.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to add richness and a tender crumb.
Egg whites
Beaten to trap air, giving the layers lift and a light structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the filling and add moisture and richness.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake layers.
Baking soda
Reacts with cream of tartar to leaven the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and forms a syrup that holds the mixture together.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup over the beaten egg yolks. Hot syrup poured into yolks while stirring gently cooks and thickens them; pouring too fast or without stirring can scramble the yolks into lumps.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, corn, cream, egg, meat):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, corn, cream, egg, meat. 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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