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Dessert

To Make Water Icing

A simple icing made from powdered sugar and water, optionally colored with cochineal, saffron, or indigo blue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

To Make Water Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. In a bowl, combine powdered sugar with enough cold water to form a thick paste.

  2. Beat the mixture well; if it's too thin, add more powdered sugar.

  3. For every pound of sugar, mix in 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar.

Color and finish

  1. To color the icing, add cochineal for pink, saffron for cream, or a drop of indigo blue to the pink for mauve.

  2. Spread the icing over the cake using a knife and let it dry.

  3. Decorate with icing sugar as desired.

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. Cream + saffrontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together243 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Sugar + saffrontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together650 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Powdered sugar
Forms the bulk of the icing and sets into a smooth, sweet coating as it dries.
Cold water
Dissolves the sugar into a spreadable paste that dries to a firm surface.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the icing, helping it stay smooth and white rather than gritty or brittle.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture well. Thorough beating dissolves the sugar evenly into the water so the icing dries smooth rather than grainy. Adjusting thickness with more sugar only after beating shows the true consistency.

Swap the saffron

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Saffronthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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