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Dessert

Boiled Frosting

A simple frosting made by boiling sugar and sweet milk, then beating until creamy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Boiled Frosting

Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Frosting

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix sugar and sweet milk in a saucepan.

  2. Place over heat and stir until it boils.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes without stirring on the back of the stove.

  4. Remove from heat and beat with a hand mixer until creamy.

  5. Spread on cake immediately and quickly.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 milk and sets into a soft, creamy frosting as the mixture cools and is beaten.
Sweet milk
Dissolves the sugar and provides the liquid that is cooked down into the frosting.

The step that matters

Boil for 5 minutes without stirring. Stirring during the boil can encourage sugar crystals to form, leading to a grainy texture. Holding the boil at the stated time brings the syrup to the concentration needed to set once beaten.

“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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