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Dessert

Prune Cake Filling

A sweet filling made from egg white, powdered sugar, blanched almonds, and English walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Prune Cake Filling

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the egg white until stiff.

  2. Gradually beat in the powdered sugar until well combined.

  3. Fold in the chopped almonds and walnuts.

  4. Use this filling for two layers of cake.

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

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

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Egg + walnuttop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,037 recipes

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

  5. Egg + almondtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Whipped to stiff peaks, it gives the filling its light, airy structure.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the whipped white to sweeten and stabilise the filling's texture.
Blanched almonds
Chopped almonds add body and a nutty flavour that contrasts with the sweetness.
English walnuts
Chopped walnuts add body, crunch and a nutty, slightly bitter flavour.

The step that matters

Fold in the nuts gently. Folding keeps the air trapped in the whipped egg white. Stirring or beating hard after adding the nuts would deflate the foam and leave the filling dense.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, almond):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, almond. 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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