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Dessert

To Make Water Icing

A simple icing made from powdered sugar, cold water, and cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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, add 1 level teaspoon of cream of tartar.

Finish the cake

  1. Spread the icing over the cake with a knife and let it dry.

  2. Decorate with icing sugar or sweet jelly, like red currant or quince.

  3. Optionally, color the icing with a light shade of pink using cochineal or a light cream color with saffron.

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).

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 gives it sweetness and body.
Cold water
Dissolves the sugar into a spreadable paste that dries to a smooth glaze.
Cream of tartar
Acidity helps keep the icing smooth and stable and less prone to crystallizing.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture well. Thorough beating dissolves the sugar fully and incorporates air, giving a smooth icing; too thin an icing will run off the cake, so adjust with more sugar before spreading.

“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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