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Dessert

Iceing for Cakes

A sweet icing made from whipped egg whites, sugar, orange flower water, and optional lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Iceing for Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Whip the egg whites to a froth.

  2. Add the sugar and orange flower water, and beat together while the cake bakes.

Ice the cake

  1. Once the cake is out of the oven, apply the icing with a spoon or a thin board.

  2. Return the cake to the oven briefly to harden the icing.

  3. Optionally, wait until the cake is nearly cold to apply 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.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and, beaten into the foam, helps it hold its shape and set.
Orange flower water
Adds a delicate floral aroma to the icing.

The step that matters

Hardening the icing in the oven. A brief spell of heat sets the whipped egg white and sugar into a firm, glossy shell. Leaving it too long over-browns the surface or makes it weep, so check it closely.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, orange. 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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