Skip to main content
Dessert

Fondant for Creams

Fondant for creams is a sugar mixture that is cooked, cooled, beaten, and flavored.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nuts and coconut work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 142 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Fondant for Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Make the fondant

  1. Stir sugar and warm water until almost dissolved.

  2. Cook the mixture until it forms a soft ball when dropped in cold water.

  3. Once cool enough to touch, beat the mixture until it creams.

Flavor

  1. Add any desired flavors and combine with 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. Nuts + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

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

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

Granulated sugar
Forms the syrup that sets into the fine, smooth crystals of fondant.
Warm water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be cooked into a syrup evenly.

The step that matters

Cooking to the soft ball stage. The sugar concentration reached at this point sets the fondant's firmness. Stopping early leaves it soft and sticky, while cooking too long makes it hard and crumbly.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, coconut):

  1. Macadamia nutfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, coconut. 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

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