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Dessert

Seville Orange Cakes

A sweet cake made from boiled orange rinds, powdered sugar, and orange pulp and 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 ↓

Seville Orange Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Divide the oranges in half, remove the seeds, and place the pulp and juice in a bowl.

  2. Boil the rinds in a covered saucepan of water until very tender.

  3. Remove the rinds and dry them on a cloth.

Make the cakes

  1. Pound the rinds in a mortar, gradually adding the powdered sugar.

  2. Mix in the juice and pulp until the mixture is thick and yellow.

  3. If the mixture is too thick to drop, let it sit overnight.

  4. Drop the mixture onto tins in small cakes and dry them under garden glasses or 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

Orange rinds
Provide the bitter aromatic peel flavour and the bulk of the cake.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps bind the pounded rinds into a paste.
Orange pulp and juice
Adds moisture and acidity, and helps the mixture become thick and yellow.

The step that matters

Boiling the rinds until very tender. Rinds that are not fully softened stay tough and fibrous, so they will not pound into a smooth paste. Thorough cooking breaks down the peel's cell walls, which is what makes the mixture pliable enough to shape.

“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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