Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
Fondant, for Masking Cakes, Etc
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.
Heat until melted, then mix cream of tartar with a little water and stir in.
Use a kitchen thermometer; when it reaches 230°F (110°C), remove from heat.
Pour into a basin rinsed with cold water and place the basin in another with cold water, renewing as needed.
Sprinkle the syrup with cold water to prevent caking and let it cool until blood-warm.
Knead and rest
Beat with a wooden spoon until stiff and white.
Turn onto a baking board and knead like dough, using icing sugar instead of flour.
Knead until smooth and elastic, then cover with a damp cloth until ready to use.
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.
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Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Forms the sweet, set body of the fondant as it crystallises into a smooth mass.
- Cream of tartar
- Acid that helps prevent large sugar crystals from forming, keeping the fondant smooth.
- Water
- Dissolves the sugar so it can be heated into a syrup.
The step that matters
Cooling the syrup to blood-warm before beating. Beating while the syrup is too hot yields large crystals and a grainy texture; cooling it lets sugar form many fine crystals, giving a smooth, creamy fondant.
“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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