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Dessert

Butter Icing

A sweet butter icing flavored with coffee essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and coffee are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,344 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Butter Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sift the icing sugar through a fine sieve.

  2. Cream the butter in a bowl, gradually adding the icing sugar with a wooden spoon until well mixed and creamy.

  3. Add the coffee essence or other flavoring gradually while continuing to cream.

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 + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + coffeetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Icing sugar
Provides sweetness and bulk, and dissolves into the butter to give a smooth, spreadable texture.
Butter
Provides fat that creams with the sugar to create a light, smooth, spreadable icing.
Coffee essence
Adds concentrated coffee flavor and aroma to the icing.

The step that matters

Adding the icing sugar gradually while creaming. Adding sugar in small amounts lets it blend evenly into the butter. Dumping it in all at once can leave the icing lumpy, grainy, or stiff, and it is harder to smooth out once combined.

“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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