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Dessert

Vienna Icing

A sweet icing made with butter, icing sugar, liqueur, chocolate, jam, nuts, and vanilla, used to fill and coat cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 608 recipes. Both carry 4-methoxybenzaldehyde, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Vienna Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Sift in the icing sugar and beat until combined.

  3. Add the liqueur or Noyeau syrup and divide the mixture into four equal parts.

Flavor the four parts

  1. For the first part, add the grated chocolate and a few drops of vanilla essence.

  2. For the second part, color it pale pink with carmine, then add the chopped walnuts and brandy.

  3. For the third part, mix in the apricot jam.

  4. For the fourth part, add the chopped browned almonds.

Assemble

  1. Spread these mixtures between layers of sponge cake or Genoese pastry.

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. Apricot + vanillatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together608 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  2. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Vanilla + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Apricot + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to form the body and soft, spreadable texture of the icing.
Icing sugar
Sweetens the icing and, with the butter, gives it a smooth, stable body.
Grated chocolate
Adds bitter cocoa flavor and color to one of the four icing portions.
Apricot jam
Adds fruit sweetness and acidity, and moisture, to one of the four portions.
Chopped browned almonds
Add toasted, nutty flavor and a crunchy texture to one portion.
Dried walnuts
Add nutty flavor and a chewy crunch to one of the pink portion.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, syrup, chocolate, apricot, butter, vanilla, almond):

  1. Hazelnutfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, syrup, chocolate, apricot, butter, vanilla, almond. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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