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Dessert

Yellow Icing

A yellow icing made from egg yolks, sugar syrup, water, and orange flavoring, optionally with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and nuts work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 280 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Yellow Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine water and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Cook until the syrup drops from a spoon.

Make and finish the icing

  1. Gradually beat the hot syrup into the beaten egg yolks while continuing to cook the syrup.

  2. Once all the syrup is incorporated and the mixture is cool, add orange flavoring.

  3. Spread the icing between cake layers before it stiffens.

  4. Optionally, add nuts to the filling.

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. Orange + nutstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together280 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

  5. Egg + nutstop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,624 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 yolks
Yolks add richness and body, and their proteins help the icing thicken.
Sugar
Sugar sweetens the icing and, cooked into syrup, helps it set firm as it cools.

The step that matters

Gradually beating the hot syrup into the yolks. Hot syrup can scramble or curdle the egg yolks if added too quickly. Adding it slowly while beating spreads the heat evenly, so the yolks cook smoothly and thicken the icing.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, orange):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, orange. 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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