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Dessert

Cream Chocolate Icing

A chocolate icing made by boiling sugar and sweet milk, then thickening and adding dissolved chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Chocolate Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Boil sugar and sweet milk for 7 minutes.

  2. Beat the mixture until it begins to thicken.

Ice the cake

  1. Spread the cream over the cake.

  2. Cover the cake with the dissolved chocolate.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sugar
Sweetens the icing and, once boiled and beaten, helps form a thick, creamy body.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and richness, so the boiled sugar becomes a smooth cream.
Dissolved chocolate
Gives flavour and colour to the outer coating on the cake.

The step that matters

Beating until it begins to thicken. As the boiled sugar mixture cools and is beaten, it turns thick and creamy. Spreading it too early leaves it runny, while beating too long can make it set too firm to spread.

“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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