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Dessert

Frosting

A light frosting made from egg whites, sugar, and flavoring, suitable for icing cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Frosting

Ingredients

Directions

Make the frosting

  1. In a shallow dish, combine the whites of your eggs with part of the sugar, about ¼ pound (16 tablespoons) for each egg.

  2. Beat the mixture for about 30 minutes, gradually adding the remaining sugar.

  3. Add your chosen flavoring, adjusting the sugar if using lemon juice.

  4. For color, use strawberry juice for pink or lemon juice and rind for yellow.

Ice the cake

  1. Dredge the cooled cake with flour and wipe it clean before icing.

  2. Spread the frosting over the cake using a large knife, dipping it in cold water as needed.

  3. Allow the frosting to dry in a cool, dry place.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Whites of eggs
Whipped with sugar to form the foam that makes the frosting light and set.
Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the whipped whites to add sweetness and stiffen the frosting.

The step that matters

Beating the mixture for about 30 minutes. Long beating while adding sugar gradually builds a stable foam; if sugar is added too fast or beating is cut short, the frosting stays loose and may weep or fail to dry firm.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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