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To Ice Cakes

A cake finished with a stiff egg white frosting and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar 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 ↓

To Ice Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. Spread the beaten egg whites over the cooled pastry.

Bake and finish

  1. Sift icing sugar thickly over the egg whites.

  2. Return the pastry to the oven and let the icing become a pale golden brown.

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. Egg + sugartop 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 whites
Whipped to a stiff foam, they form the light topping that sets and browns in the oven.
Icing sugar
Sweetens the topping and, when heated, caramelises to give a pale golden colour.

The step that matters

Letting the icing turn pale golden brown. Whites and sugar brown quickly once heated, so the cook must watch closely. Too little heat leaves the topping pale and soft, while too much scorches the sugar and gives a bitter taste.

“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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