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Dessert

Cream Hickory-nut Cake

A sweet cake made with hickory nuts, sugar, milk, flour, butter, eggs, baking powder, and sweet cream filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cream Hickory-nut 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 together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the milk and beaten eggs, mixing well.

  4. Gradually add the sifted flour and baking powder, stirring until combined.

  5. Divide the batter into 4 layers and bake until golden.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. For the filling, whip the sweet cream and mix in the sugar, hickory-nut meats, salt, and flavor.

  2. Spread the filling on the cooled cake 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Bind the batter and add structure as the layers set in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and creamed with sugar it traps air for lightness.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and become light.
Sifted flour
Forms the cake's structure once it sets during baking.
Hickory-nut meats
Provide crunch and a rich, nutty flavor in the filling.
Sweet cream
Whipped, it gives the filling a light, moist texture.

The step that matters

Cool the cake layers before spreading the filling. Warm layers are fragile and release steam, so the whipped cream filling would melt, slide, and soak in. Cooling lets the crumb firm up so the filling stays on top and holds its texture.

“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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