Skip to main content
Dessert

Seville Orange Cakes

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Cut 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 paste

  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.

Shape and dry

  1. Drop the mixture onto tins in small cakes.

  2. Dry the cakes under garden glasses or in a cool oven.

  3. If the cakes are too thick, let them sit overnight.

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

The step that matters

Pound the rinds with the sugar until smooth. Tender rinds that are not fully broken down stay fibrous and gritty, so the paste will not set evenly. Adding the sugar gradually helps the rinds break down and combine into a uniform mass.

“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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes