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Dessert

Orange Cakes

A cake made from Seville orange rinds, powdered sugar, and orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Peel the Seville oranges and weigh the rinds.

  2. Boil the rinds in two or three waters until easily pierced with a fork.

  3. Drain the rinds.

Make the mixture

  1. Pound the rinds in a mortar with double their weight in powdered sugar and the pulp and juice of the oranges, removing skin and seeds.

  2. Beat the mixture thoroughly; if it is too thick, add more orange juice.

  3. Let the mixture stand for a few hours.

Shape and dry

  1. Drop the mixture onto buttered tins in small rounds.

  2. Dry the rounds in a cool oven.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Seville oranges
Rind and pulp supply the bitter, aromatic citrus flavour that defines the cake.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps it bind into a paste that holds its shape.
Orange juice
Adds moisture to loosen the mixture to a workable, beatable consistency.

The step that matters

Boil the rinds until easily pierced. Rinds that are not fully softened stay tough and fibrous after pounding, and boiling in several changes of water helps reduce bitterness. Pounding only works well once the rinds are tender.

“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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