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Dessert

Minnehaha Cake

A layered cake with butter, sugar, flour, milk, egg whites, raisins, and walnuts, topped with a sugar syrup 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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream the butter and 2 cups of sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the flour, milk, and baking powder, mixing until smooth.

  4. Beat the egg whites until very light and fold them into the batter.

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

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil 2 cups of sugar and ½ cup of water until it forms a thread.

  2. Slowly pour the syrup over the beaten whites of 2 eggs, mixing well.

  3. Stir in the raisins and walnuts.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the layers and on top of the 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. 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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 trap air, giving the cake a light, tender crumb.
Flour
Builds the cake's structure once it sets in the oven.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they lighten the batter and help it rise and hold its shape.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the layers rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, in the filling, cooks to a syrup that sets the frosting.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup into the beaten whites. The syrup must be pour slowly while beating, so the hot sugar cooks the egg whites into a stable, glossy foam. Pouring too fast can deflate the whites and leave the filling runny.

Swap the walnut

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

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

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