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Dessert

Iceing for a Rich Cake

A stiff egg white icing thickened with syrup, applied to cakes and baked until dry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and syrup are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,995 recipes. The science ↓

Iceing for a Rich Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Whisk the egg whites until very stiff.

  2. In a small saucepan, bring the syrup to a boil until it can blow through a skimmer.

  3. Stir the syrup until it becomes thick and white.

  4. Mix the thickened syrup with the whisked egg whites until well combined.

Coat and dry

  1. Spread the icing over your cakes and place them in the oven to dry.

  2. Once dry, apply another coat and smooth it out as much as possible.

  3. Allow the icing to dry completely in the oven.

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. Egg + syruptop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,995 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whisked into a stiff foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Syrup
Sweetens the icing and, once boiled and stirred, thickens to give it body.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup. The syrup must reach the stage where it can blow through a skimmer. If it is undercooked, the icing stays runny and will not hold its shape; if it is overcooked, it sets too hard and grainy to spread well over the cakes.

“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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