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Dessert

Marble Icing

A frosting that mixes melted chocolate and confectioner's sugar with white frosting to create a marbled pattern.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Marble Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chocolate frosting

  1. Melt the chocolate and confectioner's sugar in a small saucepan over boiling water.

  2. Add ½ cup of white frosting to the melted chocolate and stir well.

Frost and marble the cake

  1. Spread the cake with the white frosting smoothly.

  2. Drop the chocolate frosting from a tablespoon into the white frosting irregularly to create a marble effect.

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. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Baker's bitter chocolate
Provides the dark color and bitter chocolate flavor for the marbled pattern.
Confectioner's sugar
Sweetens the melted chocolate and helps it blend smoothly into the frosting.
White frosting
Forms the base layer and is thinned with melted chocolate to make the contrasting marble lines.

The step that matters

Dropping the chocolate frosting into the white frosting. Chocolate frosting dropped in irregularly, rather than stirred through, keeps distinct streaks; overmixing blends the two colors into an even tan.

“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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