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Dessert

Neapolitan Cake

A lemon-flavored layered cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, and topped with icing and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Neapolitan Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a basin, whisk together the butter and sugar until well combined.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

  3. Gently mix in the flour, baking powder, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

Bake and assemble

  1. Spoon 2 tablespoons of the batter onto tin plates and bake.

  2. Once baked, trim the edges and cut out the center with a cake cutter.

  3. Spread a thin layer of icing on the edges and stack the layers to form a high cake.

  4. Fill the center with whipped cream and frost the top.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps create a light texture.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and bind the batter as it sets in the oven.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the thin layers rise and stay light.
Lemon
Adds bright aroma and acidity from the rind and juice to the cake.

The step that matters

Spooning the batter onto tin plates. Each layer must be spread thin and even so it bakes through evenly and stacks neatly. Thick or uneven layers can bake unevenly, leaving the cake either doughy or dry.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, flour, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, cream. 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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