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Dessert

Bitter and Sweet Almond Icing

A glaze made from sweet and bitter almonds, sugar, and water, used to top baked cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,679 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Bitter and Sweet Almond Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Blanch the sweet and bitter almonds.

  2. Pound the almonds together with the sugar in a mortar.

  3. Add enough water to prevent the mixture from oiling.

  4. Beat into a paste.

Finish the cake

  1. Spread the paste on top of a baked cake.

  2. Cover with plain sugar icing.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Make up most of the paste and give it a mild, rich almond body.
Bitter almonds
Add a stronger, more aromatic almond flavour to the paste.
Sugar
Sweetens the paste and is pounded with the almonds to help them break down.

The step that matters

Adding water while pounding. Almonds are rich in oil, and pounding them can make the mixture separate and turn oily. A little water helps the oil stay emulsified, keeping the paste smooth and spreadable.

“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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