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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A simple icing made by boiling sugar with water, then mixing with beaten egg whites and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Boil sugar and boiling water until it forms a soft ball in cold water.

  2. Remove from heat and pour over beaten egg whites.

  3. Beat well until thick enough to spread.

Finish and spread

  1. Flavor with vanilla and spread between layers and on top of the cake.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the boiling water to form a syrup that sets the icing's sweet structure.
Egg whites
Beaten into the hot syrup, they trap air and give the icing its light, thick body.
Boiling water
Dissolves the sugar and helps bring the syrup to the soft-ball stage.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup to the soft-ball stage. Sugar syrup that is boiled too little stays runny and will not thicken when beaten, while boiled too long it turns stiff and grainy. The soft-ball test in cold water shows when the sugar concentration is right for a spreadable icing.

“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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