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Dessert

Minnehaha Cake

A layered cake with butter, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, egg whites, raisin and hickory nut filling, topped with maple filling.

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 together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the milk, flour, baking powder, and egg whites, and mix well.

  3. Bake in layers at 350°F (175°C).

Make the fillings

  1. For the filling, boil 1 cup sugar, raisins, hickory nuts, and sweet cream until thick enough to spread.

  2. For the maple filling, boil 1 cup maple sugar until it thickens, then stir in 2 tablespoons butter while beating rapidly.

Assemble

  1. Spread the maple filling thickly over the cake and between 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake layers together.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and stay light.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift to the batter as they set in the oven.
Maple sugar
Boiled to a thick, spreadable filling that sets as it cools.

The step that matters

Beating the maple filling while adding butter. Boiled sugar must be beaten as it cools and thickens; if it is not beaten rapidly, the butter may not blend in and the filling can turn grainy or separate instead of becoming smooth and spreadable.

Swap the nuts

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

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

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