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Caramel Candy or Icing

A caramel candy made by boiling sugar and water, then cooling and molding; can be turned into icing with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Caramel Candy or Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Combine hot water and both sugars in a saucepan; stir until dissolved.

  2. Boil the mixture slowly until it forms a lump in water.

Cool and shape

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and cover with a coarse cloth while cooling.

  2. Stir the mixture until it hardens, then mold it in your hands until smooth.

  3. Cut the hardened caramel into small squares.

Finish

  1. If making icing, thin the squares with sweet thick cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Nuts + creamtop 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

Medium brown sugar
Provides the main sweetness and the caramel flavour and colour.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the mixture set firm when cooked and cooled.
Sweet thick cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the squares when thinned into icing.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture slowly until it forms a lump in water. Sugar syrup sets according to its final temperature. Boiling too little leaves the caramel soft and sticky, while boiling too long makes it hard and brittle. Stopping at the soft-ball stage gives a firm but chewable texture.

Swap the nuts

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

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

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