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Dessert

Hickorynut Cake

A layered cake made with eggs, sugar, butter or cream, flour, baking powder, and hickory nuts, filled with a custard-like cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Hickorynut 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. Beat together the eggs, sugar, cream or butter, flour, and baking powder in a bowl until smooth.

  3. Pour the batter into jelly tins and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. Beat together 2 eggs, 1 cup sugar, corn starch, and chopped hickory nuts for the cream filling.

  2. Stir the mixture into boiling milk and cook until thick like custard.

Assemble

  1. Let the filling cool, then spread it between the cake 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Set as they bake, giving the cake layers structure and a firm crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the batter once its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the layers rise and turn light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while tenderising the crumb.
Corn-starch
Thickens the milk into a custard-like filling when cooked with heat.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the cornstarch thickens into the filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling in boiling milk. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the mixture reaches a boil and is stirred constantly. Adding the egg-sugar mixture too fast or stopping early can leave lumps, a thin texture, or scorched milk on the bottom of the pan.

“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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