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Dessert

Ice Cream Icing for White Cake

A sugar icing made with powdered sugar, vanilla, egg whites, citric acid, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Ice Cream Icing for White Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 2 cups of powdered sugar to a thick syrup.

  2. Add 3 teaspoons of vanilla and let it cool.

  3. Once cool, add 2 beaten egg whites and 2 teaspoons of citric acid.

Make the icing

  1. In a deep bowl, combine 1 pound of powdered sugar with 1 tablespoon of cold water.

  2. Beat 3 egg whites lightly and add to the sugar and water mixture.

  3. Place the bowl in a vessel of boiling water and heat until it becomes thin and clear.

  4. Once it thickens, remove from heat and stir until cool enough to spread with a knife.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Vanilla + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Powdered sugar
Forms the sweet base, and cooked into a syrup it sets the icing's body.
Egg whites
Add structure and foam, helping the icing hold its shape and turn fluffy.
Citric acid
Adds a sharp tang and helps stabilise the egg whites against collapsing.

The step that matters

Heating the icing over boiling water. Heat must be gentle and controlled. Overheating or stirring too late can cook the egg whites into lumps, while too little heat leaves the icing runny instead of thickening as it cools.

“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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