Skip to main content
Dessert

Plain Boiled Frosting

A light, airy frosting made by boiling sugar syrup and folding it into beaten egg white, flavored with vanilla or almond.

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

Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Plain Boiled Frosting

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and boiling water in a saucepan and stir gently until melted.

  2. Boil rapidly without stirring until the syrup spins a long hair when tested in cold water.

Whip and finish

  1. Beat the egg white with salt until very stiff.

  2. Pour the boiling syrup onto the beaten egg white while beating vigorously.

  3. Continue to beat for a few minutes until the mixture thickens to a cream.

  4. Beat in vanilla or almond extract and spread between layers and on top of cake.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  3. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup, providing sweetness and the body that sets the frosting.
Egg white
Whipped to a stiff foam that gives the frosting its light, airy structure.
Boiling water
Dissolves the sugar and, once boiled, concentrates into a syrup that thickens the frosting.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup without stirring until it spins a long hair. Stirring during boiling can encourage sugar crystals to form, and the syrup must reach the right concentration to set the frosting. Stopping too early leaves it runny; boiling too long makes it stiff and grainy.

“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

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes