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Dessert

Chocolate Icing

A sweet glaze made from sugar, water, chocolate, milk, and butter, boiled and stirred until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Chocolate Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan and boil until it ropes.

  2. Remove from heat and stir until it begins to turn white.

  3. Add melted chocolate and stir thoroughly.

  4. Set the bowl over a pot of hot water, add cold water, and stir until thin and smooth.

Finish

  1. Use a stiff feather or knife to coat each eclair with the icing.

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 + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Chocolate + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,543 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

Sugar
Forms a syrup that, once cooled and stirred, crystallizes into a smooth, glossy icing.
Sweet chocolate
Provides the main chocolate flavor and body in the icing.
Bitter chocolate
Adds deeper chocolate flavor and balances the sweetness of the icing.
Butter
Adds fat for a softer texture and smoother mouthfeel in the icing.

The step that matters

Stir the syrup as it cools until it begins to turn white. Stirring a boiled sugar syrup as it cools encourages fine crystals to form, which gives the icing a smooth, glossy texture. Stirring too early or too little can leave it grainy or too runny to hold on the eclairs.

“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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