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Dessert

Potato Caramel Cake

A sweet cake made with mashed potatoes, chocolate, and walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Potato Caramel 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.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the egg yolks, mashed potatoes, milk, spices, and grated chocolate; mix well.

  3. Gradually add the flour, incorporating the baking powder with the last bit of flour.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites and then add the chopped walnuts.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

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. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake, helps tenderness, and aids browning.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Mashed potatoes
Adds moisture, keeping the cake soft and helping it stay fresh.
Eggs
Bind the batter, add structure, and the whites add lift when beaten.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cake to rise in the oven.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Beaten whites hold air that gives the cake its lift. Folding gently, rather than stirring, keeps that air in the batter so the cake rises evenly and stays light.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

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