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Walnut Ceeam Filling Foe Layee Cakes

A walnut cream filling for layered cakes made with butter, icing sugar, walnuts, vanilla, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Vanilla and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Walnut Ceeam Filling Foe Layee Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a mixing bowl, beat the softened butter with the icing sugar until creamy.

  2. Add the finely chopped walnuts and mix well into the butter and sugar.

  3. Flavor the mixture with vanilla extract and sherry.

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. Vanilla + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Walnut + vanillatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,730 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Butter + vanillatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the filling.
Icing sugar
Sweetens the filling and, creamed with butter, gives it a smooth texture.
Walnuts
Provide crunchy texture and a nutty flavor throughout the filling.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, vanilla, sherry):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Cocoafits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, vanilla, sherry. 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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