Name: Yellow or Golden Icing
Ingredients: 1 egg yolk; orange juice; grated orange peel

Why it works: Egg and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,696 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Yellow or Golden Icing

Ingredients

1 egg yolk
orange juice
grated orange peel

Directions

Make the icing as you would with white unboiled icing, using the egg yolk instead of the egg white.
Flavor the icing with orange juice.
For a deeper yellow, grate orange peel into the orange juice and strain through cheesecloth before adding to the icing.

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.

Egg + orangetop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,696 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Egg and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,696 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 yolk: Replaces the egg white to give the icing a richer, yellow color and added fat.
Orange juice: Adds acidity and orange flavor to the sweet icing.
Grated orange peel: Adds concentrated orange aroma and a deeper yellow tint once strained into the juice.

“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.