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Dessert

Chocolate Icing

A chocolate icing made by boiling sugar, water, tartaric acid, and chocolate, then pouring over pastries or cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine loaf sugar, cold water, and tartaric acid in an enamelled saucepan.

  2. Bruise the chocolate and stir it into the mixture.

  3. Boil for a few minutes until the syrup thickens.

Finish

  1. Pour over pastry or cakes.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides the sweetness and the body that lets the syrup thicken as it boils.
Tartaric acid
Adds a little acidity that helps keep the sugar syrup smooth rather than grainy.
Chocolate
Supplies the chocolate flavour and colour of the frosting.

The step that matters

Boil until the syrup thickens. Thickness depends on how much water has evaporated from the sugar syrup. Boiling too briefly leaves a thin glaze that runs off, while boiling too long makes it stiffen and set hard as it cools.

“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.

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