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Dessert

Cake with Ornamental Frosting

A loaf cake frosted with plain icing, then decorated with ornamental designs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cake with Ornamental Frosting

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake

  1. Bake a handsome loaf cake.

  2. Frost it thinly with plain white icing.

  3. Let it dry before adding ornamentation.

Make the piping cone

  1. Make a cone from stiff writing paper.

  2. Secure it with paste or egg white.

Make the decorating icing

  1. Mark a design on the dry icing with a pencil for vines, wreaths, or flowers.

  2. In a bowl, combine half the icing sugar with the egg whites. Beat vigorously with a wooden paddle.

  3. Add ½ teaspoon cream of tartar and half the remaining sugar. Beat longer.

  4. Gradually add the rest of the sugar until the frosting reaches the right consistency to flow.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Egg whites
Whipped to form the foam that gives the icing its structure and sheen.
Icing sugar
Sweetens the icing and, once beaten in, thickens it into a smooth, pipeable frosting.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the egg whites, helping them whip to a more stable foam.

The step that matters

Gradually add the rest of the sugar. Adding sugar in stages lets the foam stay stable while the icing thickens. Too much sugar at once can make it stiff or dense, and too little leaves it too runny to hold a design.

“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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