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Dessert

Fondant

A sugar glaze made by cooking sugar and milk, cooling, beating, and spreading over a cake, topped with melted chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Fondant

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Cook sugar and milk until a soft ball forms in water.

  2. Let it cool before beating, then beat until creamy.

Finish the cake

  1. Spread on top of cake.

  2. Add melted sweet chocolate over the fondant.

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 + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Provides sweetness and, when cooked and beaten, forms the fine crystals that make the icing smooth.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, helping the cooked sugar become a spreadable icing.
Sweet chocolate
Adds flavour and a rich colour to the icing.

The step that matters

Cooking to the soft ball stage and cooling before beating. Cooking the sugar and milk to the right temperature sets how much water remains. Cooling before beating lets the sugar form small crystals, so the icing turns creamy instead of grainy or hard.

“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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