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To Ice a Cake with Royal Icing

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Ice a Cake with Royal Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare almond paste and flatten it into a round shape the size of the cake. Place it on top and press down with a palette knife, ensuring it adheres to the edges.

  2. If possible, let the almond paste dry for a day or two in a warm kitchen or pantry.

  3. Prepare royal icing. Place the cake on an upside-down plate and cover the top and sides with the icing using a palette knife.

  4. To smooth the icing, dip the knife in cold water and pass it over the top and sides several times.

  5. Decorate the sides of the cake with desiccated coconut, chopped almonds, or crushed pistachios by placing them on a sheet of paper, lifting the cake onto the paper, and pressing the decorations against the sides.

  6. To create decorative roses, fill a syringe with icing, attach the rose tube, and press gently to form roses or stars.

  7. Make a ring in the center of the cake with a round cutter, then add another ring of roses around it.

  8. Replace the rose tube with a leaf tube to create leaves by pressing gently and oscillating slightly to control the size.

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. Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Almond + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Coconut + pistachiotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  5. Pistachio + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

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

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

Swap the almond

The recipe marks almond as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coconut, pistachio, sugar):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Macadamia nutfits about as well
  3. Almondthe original
  4. Brazil nutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against coconut, pistachio, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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