Skip to main content
Dessert

Cake with Ornamental Frosting.

A loaf cake frosted with plain white icing and decorated with ornamental designs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 loaf cake and frost it thinly with plain white icing.

  2. Let the icing dry before adding ornamentation.

Make the royal icing

  1. Combine half the icing sugar with the egg whites in a bowl and beat vigorously with a wooden paddle.

  2. Add cream of tartar and half the remaining sugar, then beat longer.

  3. Gradually add the rest of the sugar until the icing is the right consistency to flow through the cone.

Decorate

  1. Make a cone from stiff writing paper and secure it with paste or egg white.

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

  3. Fill the cone three-fourths full, fold the end down, and cut off the point to create the desired hole size.

  4. Guide the cone with your left hand and press the icing out with your right thumb, following the marked lines.

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
Whip into a foam that gives the icing its structure and sets it firm as it dries.
Fine icing sugar
Provides sweetness and bulk, and stiffens the icing as it is added.
Cream of tartar
Stabilises the egg white foam so it holds its shape and does not collapse.

The step that matters

Gradually add the sugar to reach the right consistency. Too little sugar leaves the icing runny and it will spread or fail to hold lines; too much makes it stiff and hard to press through the cone. Adding sugar slowly lets you stop at the point where it flows smoothly yet keeps its shape.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes