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Dessert

Soft Icing for Cakes

A simple icing made from sugar, milk, butter, and flavoring, boiled and stirred until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Soft Icing for Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the icing

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar, milk, and butter.

  2. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes.

Thicken and spread

  1. Remove from heat and stir constantly until it begins to thicken.

  2. Add flavoring to taste while stirring.

  3. Spread the icing immediately over 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

White sugar
Sweetens the icing and, as it cools and recrystallizes, gives it a soft set.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that dissolves the sugar and gives the icing a creamy moisture.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, richer texture and a tender mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stirring constantly after removing from heat. As the hot sugar mixture cools, it thickens quickly. Constant stirring keeps it smooth and evenly cooled, while prompt spreading matters because the icing sets fast and can turn grainy or hard to spread.

“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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