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Dessert

To Make Iceing for Cakes

A simple icing made from refined sugar, egg whites, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Iceing for Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Take enough double refined loaf sugar to ice your cake or cakes and place it in an earthen pan.

  2. Add the whites of eggs until the mixture is soft.

  3. Beat the mixture well, adding a little lemon juice until you can just taste the acid.

Ice the cake

  1. Spread the icing on your cake using a knife.

  2. Beat the icing with a small wooden spatula.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 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

Double refined loaf sugar
Provides the sweetness and the bulk that the icing is built from.
Whites of eggs
Whipped proteins trap air and set into a soft, stable structure.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps stabilise the egg white foam.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice. Acid helps keep the beaten egg whites stable and balances the sugar, but too much makes the icing sour. Add it a little at a time and taste as you go, as the record directs.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

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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