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Dessert

Neapolitan Cake

A layered cake with apricot jam, almond paste, and chocolate icing, flavored with raspberry or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and raspberry work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 257 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Neapolitan Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Separate the egg whites from the yolks.

  2. Cream the yolks and sugar for about 5 minutes.

  3. Add the melted butter and continue to cream until very light.

  4. Sift the flour and baking powder together.

  5. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks.

  6. Add the whipped egg whites and flour alternately to the yolk mixture.

  7. Divide the batter in half; color one half pink and flavor with raspberry essence or rose water.

  8. Leave the other half yellow and flavor with vanilla.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake in two greased sandwich tins at 400°F (200°C) for about 15 minutes.

  2. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

  3. Spread apricot jam on both layers.

  4. On one layer, add a layer of almond paste made from 3 oz ground almonds.

  5. Stack the two layers together.

  6. Pour chocolate icing over the cake and decorate with royal icing or blanched pistachio nuts.

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. Apricot + raspberrytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together257 recipes

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

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Apricot + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Almond + raspberrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together552 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Almond + chocolatetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,733 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whipped whites give lift and airy structure, while yolks add richness and set the crumb.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, giving the cake a richer, softer crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the layers rise.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps trap air when creamed with the yolks.
Ground almonds
Make the almond paste layer, adding nutty flavor and moisture.

The step that matters

Folding the whipped egg whites and flour in alternately. Overmixing knocks air out of the whipped whites and develops gluten in the flour, leading to a dense, tough cake instead of a light one.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, butter, almond, chocolate, raspberry. 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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