Skip to main content
Dessert

Confectioner's Cream Candy

A candy made from confectioner's sugar, egg white, flavoring, and optional ingredients.

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

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Confectioner's Cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Weigh 1 pound of confectioner's sugar.

  2. Break the egg white in a glass.

  3. Combine the chosen flavoring with enough water to match the volume of the egg white in another glass.

Make and shape the candy

  1. Add the water and flavoring mixture to the sugar.

  2. Mix the ingredients as you would for bread.

  3. Roll the mixture on a smooth surface and cut it into squares or shape it as desired.

Add optional flavours

  1. For lemon cream, add the yolk of the egg with a little sugar and lemon flavoring.

  2. Add any kind of fruit or nuts if desired.

  3. Add a few drops of cochineal to make pink candy.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Lemon + nutstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Confectioner's sugar
Forms the bulk of the candy and provides all of its sweetness.
Egg white
Adds moisture and binds the sugar into a workable, shapeable mass.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, nuts. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes