Skip to main content
Dessert

Iceland Moss Wafers

A sweet wafer made from sugar, glucose, water, anise oil, and optional pink coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and anise work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 328 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Iceland Moss Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the syrup

  1. In a large pot, combine sugar, glucose, and water.

  2. Cook the mixture over medium heat until it reaches 300°F (150°C).

Flavor and shape

  1. Remove from heat and add oil of anise for flavor.

  2. Add a few drops of pink food coloring to achieve a delicate pink hue.

  3. Pour the mixture into a funnel and drop it in small sizes, like butter-scotch wafers.

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 + anisetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the bulk of the wafers and sets into a crisp, brittle candy as it cools.
Glucose
Inhibits crystallization, keeping the syrup smooth and the wafers less grainy.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so the syrup can be cooked evenly before reaching temperature.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to 300°F (150°C). This is the hard-crack stage, where the sugar has little water left. Stopping early leaves the wafers soft or sticky; cooking too far scorches the sugar and tastes bitter.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes