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Dessert

Chocolate Icing

A sweet icing made from sugar syrup, egg whites, and melted chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil sugar and water in a saucepan until it forms a syrup.

  2. While the syrup is hot, add the egg whites and stir well.

  3. Mix in the melted chocolate until fully combined.

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).

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

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

  3. Chocolate + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the icing and, when boiled into syrup, gives it body and a glossy set.
Egg whites
Add structure and body, helping the icing thicken and hold its shape as it cools.
Melted chocolate
Supplies the chocolate flavour, colour and fat that give the icing richness.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites to the hot syrup. The heat from the syrup partly cooks the egg whites, so stirring them in well while the syrup is still hot keeps the mixture smooth instead of lumpy or grainy.

“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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