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Dessert

Minnehaha Cake

A layered cake made with sugar, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, egg whites, raisins, hickory nuts, and a sweet cream filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Minnehaha 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. Cream together the sugar and butter, then add the milk and mix well.

  2. Sift together the flour and baking powder, then add to the mixture.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the batter.

  4. Bake in layers at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil 1 cup of sugar, raisins, and hickory nuts in ½ cup of sweet cream until thick enough to spread.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

  5. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to add richness and a tender crumb.
Egg whites
Beaten until stiff and folded in, they add lift and structure to the batter.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the layers rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.
Sweet cream
Cooked with sugar and nuts to form a thick, spreadable filling.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites hold air only when beaten to stiff peaks; under-beaten whites give a dense cake, while over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy and lose their ability to fold smoothly into the batter.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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

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