Name: Wine Icing
Ingredients: ½ cup wine; powdered sugar

Why it works: Wine and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,581 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Wine Icing

Ingredients

½ cup wine
powdered sugar

Directions

Make the icing

In a bowl, combine the wine with enough powdered sugar to create a thick icing that can be spread.

Ice and set

Smooth the icing over the cake.
If a thicker icing is desired, apply a second layer.
Let the cake sit in a cool, dry place for at least 1 hour.

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.

Wine + sugartop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together9,581 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Wine: Provides the liquid that dissolves the powdered sugar into a spreadable icing with flavor.
Powdered sugar: Thickens the wine into a spreadable icing and provides sweetness.

“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.