The ‘Torta Paradiso’ will keep well for a day or two. However, if you intend to enjoy it the day after you make it we recommend storing it in a cake tin with a lid, thereby ensuring it remains moist and fragrant.

It was Enrico Vigoni, famous pastry chef of Pavia, who invented the sponge cake known in Italy as ‘Torta Paradiso’. It seems that the name derives from the fact that one of the first customers who tasted it said that he had just been treated to a cake ‘from paradise’.