Skip to main content
Dessert

Egg Balls

Egg Balls are sweet balls made from sugar syrup and beaten egg yolks, cooled and rolled, then dipped in caramel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Make a thick syrup by combining sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Beat the egg yolks until very light and almost white.

  3. Remove the syrup from the stove and stir in the beaten egg yolks.

  4. Return the mixture to the stove and cook slowly until thickened.

Shape and coat

  1. Once cooled, roll the mixture into balls.

  2. Dip the balls in caramel as you would with fruit glace.

Arrange and serve

  1. Arrange the caramelled balls in a dish in a circle, filling the center with spun caramel.

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the syrup as they cook and bind the mixture into a soft, set mass.
Sugar
Forms the thick syrup base and, as caramel, provides sweetness and the coating.

The step that matters

Cook the yolk mixture slowly until thickened. Egg yolks set when heated, but high heat can curdle them into lumps. Cooking gently and stirring keeps the mixture smooth and evenly thickened.

“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.

More egg balls recipes

for Soup 46Bacon 7Mock Turtle 4 See all 90 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes