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Chocolate Icing

A simple chocolate icing made by melting chocolate with boiling water and mixing in powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and sugar 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the chocolate in an enameled saucepan with boiling water.

  2. Set on the stove for a few minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Remove from heat and add the powdered sugar.

  4. Stir until perfectly smooth.

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. Chocolate + sugartop 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

Ghirardelli's ground chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavor and dark color, and melts into the liquid to form the base.
Boiling water
Melts the chocolate and loosens it into a smooth, pourable mixture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the icing and adds body as it is stirred in.

The step that matters

Stir constantly over the stove. Chocolate can scorch on the bottom of the pan if it sits still over heat. Scorched chocolate tastes bitter and burnt, so constant stirring keeps the heat even and the icing smooth.

“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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