Midwestern luxury tastes like morel mushrooms in the spring, sweet corn in the summer, and black walnuts in the fall. You may be able to fill buckets with black walnuts, but getting to the nutmeat inside takes the kind of painstaking work that justifies high-end pricing. Processing walnuts is a pursuit for our time. It’s meditative and rewarding. In a moment when opportunity can feel out of reach, our walnut promises that, with elbow grease and commitment, you, too, can wring value from the refuse on the sidewalk.

Unfortunately, if you haven’t already collected this year’s walnuts, you’re too late. The season is over. The good news: Even out of season, the black walnut is an accessible luxury. You can buy wild-harvested Midwestern black walnuts online or at many supermarkets, thanks to the processors at Stockton, Missouri’s Hammons Black Walnuts.

So you can still put a black walnut cake on the table this holiday season. My favorite recipe comes from outside our native walnut’s range—from the late McCrady’s Tavern in Charleston, South Carolina. The mind behind it, though, is Midwestern. Chef Katy Powers grew up in Wisconsin. She got her start at bakeries in Milwaukee, then earned a degree at the Culinary Institute of America and made her name at Lincoln Ristorante in New York before moving to South Carolina to work with the Neighborhood Dining Group. Today, she’s the restaurant group’s Culinary Liaison.

Back at McCrady’s, she was working under the famed chef Sean Brock—a black walnut booster himself, who put Appalachian recipes for black walnut pound cake and his grandmother’s “hillbilly black walnut fudge” in his first book, Heritage. Inspired by conversations with Brock, Powers came up with a black walnut cake that paid tribute to Appalachia. When I first tried it in 2016, I thought it tasted like the Midwest.

After all, I’ve been able to source the key ingredients near home this fall: walnuts that I gathered in five-gallon buckets, apple butter from a nearby farm. In place of vanilla, I use black walnut nocino, which imparts a more complex flavor, with vanilla notes, to the cake and frosting. In one recipe test, I even used homemade maple syrup in place of granulated sugar. It works. Just use a little bit less maple—say, a cup and a half.

This is a home-cook-friendly riff on a fine-dining recipe. We cut three layers down to two. Powers suggested replacing her buttercream with homey cream cheese frosting, and the fig white chocolate mousse between the layers with more apple butter. “Apple butter is acidic and complex, pairing well with the uniqueness of black walnut,” she says. “Cream cheese frosting is rich and creamy, complementing the nut’s sometimes cheesy notes. All three components of the cake have different textures, so it makes the cake fun to eat from a textural standpoint, also.”

We could all use a soulful taste of place during this close-to-home holiday season. This cake strikes the right balance: ambitious and easy to make, rustic and refined, luxurious and down-to-earth. We’ll be enjoying it on Thanksgiving.