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Dessert

Fondant Icing

Fondant icing is a sugar glaze made by boiling sugar, water, and glucose or cream of tartar, then cooling and flavoring with vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Fondant Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and water slowly together for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the glucose (or cream of tartar) and continue boiling until the soft ball stage is reached (240°F).

  3. If you don't have a thermometer, dip a wooden skewer into the mixture.

  4. Dip the skewer into a bowl of cold water; if it forms a soft ball, the icing is ready.

Cool and finish

  1. Sprinkle a slab with cold water.

  2. Pour the boiled sugar onto the slab.

  3. Turn the mixture over with a spatula until it cools and turns white.

  4. Flavor the icing with vanilla essence.

  5. Place the icing in a jar and use as needed.

  6. To soften the icing for use on cakes, place the jar in hot (not boiling) water.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

Sugar
Forms the sweet body of the icing and sets into a smooth, fine-textured fondant as it cools.
Glucose or cream of tartar
Interferes with sugar crystallization, keeping the fondant smooth and preventing grainy texture.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup before cooling.

The step that matters

Turning the mixture until it cools and turns white. Stirring the hot syrup on a cold slab encourages tiny sugar crystals to form. Done correctly, these stay fine, giving a smooth, opaque fondant; stirring too early or too much can make it grainy.

“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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