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Dessert

Seville Orange Cakes

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange 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 ↓

Seville Orange Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Cut the oranges in half and remove the seeds.

  2. Scrape the pulp and juice into a bowl.

  3. Boil the rinds until tender enough to pierce with a fork.

  4. Dry the rinds and weigh them.

  5. For every pound of rinds, use 2 pounds of powdered sugar.

Make the paste

  1. Pound the rinds into a paste in a mortar.

  2. Gradually add the juice, pulp, and powdered sugar to the paste.

  3. Mix until thick and yellow, then drop onto baking sheets.

Dry the cakes

  1. Dry the cakes in a cool oven for about 2 hours.

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. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange 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

Powdered sugar
Provides sweetness and bulk, and helps the paste hold its shape when dried.
Seville orange rinds
Supply the bitter aromatic flavour and the body of the cake.
Oranges' pulp and juice
Add moisture and acidity, and bring the paste to a thick, yellow mixture.

The step that matters

Gradually add the juice, pulp, and powdered sugar to the paste. Adding the liquid slowly lets the sugar and paste combine evenly. Dumping it in at once can thin the mixture unevenly, making it hard to thicken and shape into cakes that dry properly.

“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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