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Dessert

Marshmallow Icing

A sweet icing made from sugar syrup, egg whites, and marshmallows, used to coat cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Marshmallow Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Boil 2 cups of granulated sugar with enough water to dissolve it until it threads from the spoon.

  2. Pour the hot syrup over 2 beaten egg whites. Mix until combined.

  3. Once the icing is cool, add a pinch of baking powder. Stir quickly.

Prepare the marshmallows

  1. Split half of the marshmallows. Quickly dip them in hot water.

Assemble

  1. Spread the icing thickly on the cake.

  2. Place the marshmallows close together between the layers, reserving whole ones for the top.

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Dissolved and boiled into a syrup that gives the icing its sweetness and structure.
Egg whites
Beaten and combined with hot syrup to form a light, foamy structure.
Marshmallows
Add softness and sweetness, and are placed between the layers of the cake.
Baking powder
Added to the cooled icing as a leavening agent to help it stay light.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup over the egg whites. The syrup must be hot enough to cook the egg whites partially while they are beaten, which sets the foam. Pouring it slowly while beating helps create a stable, glossy icing rather than a runny or grainy one.

“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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