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Dessert

Sweet Potato and Nut Cakes

A baked sweet potato cake studded with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sweet Potato and Nut Cakes

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.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Drain the water and remove the skin.

Shape the cakes

  1. Mash the potatoes with a small amount of cream and a little sugar or maple syrup until stiff enough to mold into small cakes.

  2. Brush the tops of the cakes with butter or substitute.

Bake

  1. Sprinkle with chopped nuts and brown in the oven at 350°F (175°C).

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Sweet potato + nutstop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19 recipes

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

  4. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Form the main body of the cakes and hold their shape when mashed.
Cream
Adds moisture and softness so the mashed potato can be shaped.
Sugar or maple syrup
Adds sweetness and helps the tops brown in the oven.
Butter or substitute
Adds fat and richness and encourages browning on the surface.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch and a toasted, nutty flavour on the browned tops.

The step that matters

Mashing to a stiff consistency. Mash just enough cream and sweetener to make the potato stiff enough to hold its shape. Too much liquid makes the cakes soft and slumping, so they will not hold their form in the oven.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, cream, sugar, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, cream, sugar, butter. 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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