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Dessert

Walnut Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, sugar, butter, milk, eggs, walnuts, raisins, and baking soda.

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

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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add 1½ cups of flour and cream of tartar, mixing well.

  4. Stir in the milk and remaining 1 cup of flour mixed with baking soda.

  5. Beat in the eggs one at a time until well combined.

  6. Fold in the chopped walnuts.

  7. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 30-35 minutes.

Make the filling and finish

  1. For the filling, mix walnut meats and chopped raisins.

  2. Add the whites of four eggs and enough sugar to create a spreadable consistency.

  3. Spread the filling on the cooled cake.

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. 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 + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and lift as they set in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while tenderising the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a smooth, evenly mixed batter.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites to the filling. Raw egg whites whipped or mixed with sugar set into a spreadable filling only when the sugar ratio is right. Too little sugar leaves it runny and too much makes it stiff and grainy.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, cream, milk, 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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