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Dessert

White Glace Icing

A thick white icing made from icing sugar, lemon juice, and water, warmed and poured over cake.

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 ↓

White Glace Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Sift the icing sugar through a fine sieve into a clean saucepan.

  2. Mix in the lemon juice and enough water to achieve a very thick sauce consistency.

  3. Warm the mixture over low heat just to remove the chill.

Finish

  1. Pour the icing over the cake immediately.

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).

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

Icing sugar
Provides the sweetness and the bulk that forms the thick, opaque glaze.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the flavour of the glaze.

The step that matters

Pour the icing over the cake immediately. Icing thickens and sets as it cools, so it must go on the cake while still fluid and smooth. Warming it only gently keeps it pourable without melting the sugar into a thin syrup that runs off.

“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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