Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Maple Creams
Ingredients
Directions
Cook the syrup
Boil the water and maple sugar until it reaches a hard ball stage.
Add the butter and stir well.
Cool and shape
Place the candy pan in a larger pan filled with cold water and stir until the mixture becomes waxy.
Form the mixture into balls and place a walnut on one side of each ball.
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.
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Maple sugar
- Provides the sweetness and forms the sugar structure that sets as the mixture cools.
- Butter
- Adds fat that softens the texture and gives the creams a richer mouthfeel.
The step that matters
Stirring while the mixture cools. Stirring the cooked sugar as it cools encourages many fine sugar crystals, which give a smooth, creamy texture. Stopping too early or stirring too little can leave the candy grainy or too soft to hold its shape.
“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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