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Dessert

Little Nut Cakes

A small cake made with eggs, brown sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, and mixed nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mixed nuts and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Little Nut Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs and cold water until light and frothy.

  2. Add the brown sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt.

  3. Sift the flour again.

  4. Stir in the nuts.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of batter onto buttered baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) for 10 minutes.

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. Mixed nuts + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Mixed nuts + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten until frothy, they trap air that gives the cakes lift and a light crumb.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness, moisture and a caramel-like flavour as the cakes bake.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the cakes their structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the cakes rise and become tender.
Mixed nuts
Add texture, crunch and a toasty, rich flavour to the cakes.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs and cold water until light and frothy. Beaten eggs trap air bubbles that expand in the oven and lift the batter. If they are underbeaten, the cakes will be denser and flatter, because less air is held in the batter before baking.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, flour, mixed nuts, almond, walnut, pecans):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Brazil nutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, mixed nuts, almond, walnut, pecans. 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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