Skip to main content
Dessert

Fondant Made with Egg White and Sugar

A sweet dough made from egg white, confectioners' sugar, and water, shaped into balls and rolled in sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nuts and chocolate work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 440 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Fondant Made with Egg White and Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the fondant

  1. Break the egg white into a bowl and add cold water. Beat until creamy.

  2. Gradually add the sifted confectioners' sugar to form a handleable dough.

  3. If using, cut up any candied fruit and mix it with the fondant.

Shape and finish

  1. Dust your hands with dry sugar to prevent sticking.

  2. Shape the portions into balls and place a few nuts on top.

  3. Roll the balls in granulated sugar.

  4. Cover with chocolate and cut into squares.

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 + chocolatetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Egg + chocolatetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

  5. 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

Egg white
Whipped to a creamy base that gives the fondant its light, binding structure.
Confectioners' sugar
Forms the bulk of the dough, setting into a smooth, pliable paste as it is worked in.
Cold water
Loosens the egg white so the sugar can be incorporated into a workable dough.

The step that matters

Adding the confectioners' sugar. Sugar should be added gradually so it hydrates evenly; adding it all at once can leave a stiff, lumpy dough that is hard to smooth and shape.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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

Chocolate CreamChocolate Cream171 recipesChocolate CookiesChocolate Cookies76 recipesChocolate FudgeChocolate Fudge55 recipesChocolate Drop CookiesChocolate Drop Cookies50 recipes