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Dessert

Boiled Icing

Boiled icing is a brittle sugar glaze made by cooking sugar with water and mixing with beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in a little boiling water and cook until it is brittle enough to crack when tested in cold water.

Make the icing

  1. While beating the egg whites, add the baking powder.

  2. Slowly add the syrup to the egg whites, stirring occasionally until cool.

  3. If the icing is too stiff, add a few drops of water; if too thin, add a little powdered sugar.

Ice the cake

  1. Ensure both the cake and icing are cool before icing 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. Egg + sugartop 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

Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Granulated sugar
Cooked into a syrup that sets and sweetens the icing as it cools.
Baking powder
Added to the whipping whites to help stabilise the foam and keep it light.

The step that matters

Slowly add the syrup to the egg whites. Hot syrup poured in too fast can cook and deflate the whites or make them grainy. Adding it slowly while beating lets the syrup cool and blend into a smooth, stable foam.

“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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