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Wedding Cake Ornaments

A method for creating decorative icing ornaments on a wedding cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Wedding Cake Ornaments

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Beat the egg whites until almost stiff.

  2. Gradually add half the sugar and ½ teaspoon of acetic acid, beating thoroughly.

  3. Add the remaining sugar and another ½ teaspoon of acetic acid along with flavoring, and beat until smooth.

Prepare the cake

  1. Dust the cake with flour to remove crumbs.

  2. Apply a coat of icing.

  3. Set the cake in the sun to dry.

Pipe the decoration

  1. Fill piping tubes with icing.

  2. Create dots around the top edges at equal distances.

  3. Allow the dots to dry.

  4. Connect them with a smaller tube.

  5. Add another row of dots.

  6. Add a railing as desired.

  7. Decorate the top with intersecting rows of dots.

  8. Build up as high as the railing.

  9. Dot the sides with points or scallops.

  10. Build as on the top.

Finish the cake

  1. Prepare a piece of tissue paper 1.5 inches larger than the cake stand.

  2. Pink the edges.

  3. Place the cake on it.

  4. Create a lace edge on the bottom of the cake using the funnel at regular distances.

  5. Cover icing with a wet cloth.

  6. Beat in the white of another egg if the icing is too stiff.

  7. Add more sugar if the icing is too thin.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Sugar
Sweetens the icing and gives it body so it can hold piped shapes.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its airy structure and stiffness.
Acetic acid
Helps stabilize the egg white foam so the icing holds its shape while drying.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar gradually while beating the egg whites. Adding sugar slowly while beating helps dissolve it and builds a stable, smooth foam. Dumping it in at once can deflate the whites and leave grainy or runny icing that will not hold piped dots and railings.

“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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