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Dessert

Nut Cake

A nut cake with a brown sugar filling baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Nut Cake

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 ↓

Nut 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and compound until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Stir in the milk, flour, and baking powder until just combined.

  5. Fold in the nut meats.

  6. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 30-35 minutes.

Make and spread the filling

  1. For the filling, combine brown sugar, milk, and salt in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat until it forms a ball in water.

  3. Beat the filling until it turns light brown.

  4. Spread the filling over the cooled 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once its proteins set in the oven.
Compound
Creaming it with sugar traps air and gives the cake a tender, fine crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Brown sugar
Gives the filling its caramel flavour and moist, fudgy body.

The step that matters

Beating the filling until it turns light brown. Beating cooled sugar syrup causes it to crystallise and turn creamy and opaque. If it is beaten too early or too long, it can set too hard to spread, so timing matters.

“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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