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Dessert

Minnehaha Cake

A layered cake with butter, sugar, egg whites, milk, flour, baking powder, vanilla, and a raisin-walnut icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the milk, flour, and baking powder, mixing well.

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

  4. Divide the batter into three layers and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

Make the icing and assemble

  1. For the icing, boil 2 cups of sugar with 7 tablespoons of water until it forms a thin string.

  2. Beat 2 egg whites to a froth and gradually stir in the boiling sugar.

  3. Fold in the raisins and walnuts, then spread the icing on the 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

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

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Vanilla + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,730 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks to lighten the batter and help it rise in the oven.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it sets during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the layers rise and turn light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled with water, forms the icing's syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the icing sugar to a thin string. The sugar syrup must reach the right concentration before it is poured into the beaten egg whites. Undercooked syrup leaves the icing runny, while overcooked syrup turns hard and grainy as it cools.

Swap the walnut

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

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

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