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Dessert

Chocolate Icing

Chocolate icing made by melting chocolate, adding icing sugar and water, and stirring until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Icing

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Place the chocolate on a plate in a 400°F (200°C) oven until soft.

  2. Transfer the softened chocolate to a saucepan.

Make the icing

  1. Add the icing sugar and moisten with water.

  2. Stir over medium heat until the mixture is hot and smooth, but do not let it boil.

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. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chocolate
Provides the main flavour and, once melted, the body and gloss of the icing.
Icing sugar
Adds sweetness and bulk, and dissolves into the melted chocolate to thicken it.
Water
Moistens the icing sugar so it blends smoothly into the chocolate.

The step that matters

Stir over medium heat without boiling. Boiling can make the mixture grainy or cause it to seize and lose its smooth texture. Gentle heat keeps the chocolate and sugar blended and glossy.

“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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