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Dessert

Frosting or Icing

A sweet, beaten egg white frosting made with powdered sugar, optional lemon juice or tartaric acid, and optional flavoring or coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and saffron match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 538 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Frosting or Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Ensure the egg white and platter are cold.

  2. Use ½ cup powdered sugar for each egg white.

  3. Break the egg.

Make the frosting

  1. Add a small handful of sugar immediately.

  2. Continue adding sugar at intervals while beating the egg white until all sugar is incorporated.

  3. If the frosting is too thin, beat in more sugar.

  4. If the icing becomes too stiff, thin it with a little water.

  5. For a whiter, frothier frosting, add lemon juice or tartaric acid while beating.

Spread and decorate

  1. Spread the frosting evenly over the cake with a broad knife.

  2. Apply a second coat after the first has dried.

  3. To decorate, reserve about one-third of the icing and apply it with a clean glass syringe after the first coat has dried.

  4. Color the reserved icing as desired using natural colorings.

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. Lemon + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Sugar + saffrontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together650 recipes

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

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 white
Whipped with sugar to form the foam that gives the frosting its structure and light texture.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the beaten egg white to add sweetness and stiffen the frosting.
Lemon juice or tartaric acid
Acid that stabilizes the foam and helps keep the frosting white and frothy.

The step that matters

Keep the egg white and platter cold. Cold egg white whips to a stronger, more stable foam, which holds the sugar and gives the frosting its body. Warm egg white collapses more easily and yields a thinner, less stable frosting.

“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.

More frosting recipes

Chocolate 117Boiled 73Cake 60Caramel 43Eggless 36Gelatin 30 See all 14 →

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