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Dessert

Swiss Icing

A butter-based icing thickened with powdered sugar and flavored with optional ingredients.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Swiss Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the cream or milk and mix well.

  3. Gradually thicken the mixture with powdered sugar until desired consistency is reached.

  4. Add flavoring to suit your taste.

  5. If desired, mix in nuts, coconut, or chocolate.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Butter + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 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

Butter
Provides fat and richness, giving the icing a smooth, creamy body.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture so the powdered sugar can dissolve into a spreadable icing.
Powdered sugar
Thickens the liquid and adds sweetness, setting the icing's final consistency.

The step that matters

Gradually thicken with powdered sugar. Adding sugar all at once can make the icing stiff and lumpy. Adding it gradually lets it dissolve evenly and lets you stop at the desired consistency.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, cream, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Filbertfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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