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Dessert

Maple Sugar Icing

A glaze made from maple sugar, boiling water, and egg whites, used to coat cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Maple Sugar Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Boil the maple sugar with boiling water until it threads from the spoon.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the beaten egg whites and beat until cold.

Finish the cake

  1. Spread the icing between layers and on top of the cake.

  2. Sprinkle desiccated coconut on top for a decorative 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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Egg + coconuttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Maple sugar
Dissolves and cooks into a syrup that sets into a sweet, fudge-like icing.
Egg whites
Beaten into foam, they give the icing its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Beating the hot syrup into the egg whites. Hot syrup poured slowly over whipped whites cooks them gently and builds a stable foam. Beating until cold lets the icing thicken enough to spread without weeping.

Swap the coconut

The recipe marks coconut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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