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Dessert

To Make Icing for Cakes

A simple icing made from sugar, water, and egg whites, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Icing for Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour cold water over the sugar to dissolve lumps.

  2. Beat the egg whites lightly until slightly frothy.

  3. Add the beaten egg whites to the sugar and water mixture.

  4. Place the bowl in a vessel of boiling water and beat the mixture. Continue beating until the mixture becomes clear and then thickens.

  5. Once thick enough, remove from heat and spread on the cake until it cools and hardens.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the sweet body of the icing and sets firm as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped with heat, they build a light foam that gives the icing its structure.

The step that matters

Beating over boiling water until the mixture thickens. Heat from the water bath cooks and stabilises the egg white foam while the sugar dissolves. Stopping too early leaves the icing runny, and overheating can make it grainy or dry.

“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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