Skip to main content
Dessert

Almond Icing

A smooth almond paste mixed with sugar, optionally thickened with egg white, used as icing for cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Almond and potato work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 337 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Almond Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Blanch the sweet and bitter almonds.

  2. Pound the almonds in a mortar, adding a little rose water to prevent oiling.

  3. Continue until the almonds form a very smooth paste.

  4. Mix the almond paste with an equal weight of finely sifted sugar.

  5. If the paste is too dry, add a little egg white.

Ice the cake

  1. Spread the almond paste on the cake and let it dry and firm.

  2. Once dry, you can add sugar icing on top.

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 + potatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together337 recipes

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

  2. Almond + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,465 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

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

  5. Rose + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and rich almond flavour of the paste.
Bitter almonds
Add a stronger, more pronounced almond aroma to the paste.
Finely sifted sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps it bind into a smooth, spreadable mass.
Egg white
Adds moisture and binding to a paste that has turned too dry.

The step that matters

Pounding to a very smooth paste. Pounding until the almonds are very smooth keeps the paste spreadable and even. Adding a little rose water helps prevent the almond oils from separating, which would make the paste greasy and grainy.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, rose, sugar, egg. 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.

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesAlmond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipes