Name: Orange Icing
Ingredients: ½ lb icing sugar; a little orange coloring; 2 tablespoons orange juice

Why it works: Sugar and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Icing

Ingredients

½ lb icing sugar
a little orange coloring
2 tablespoons orange juice

Directions

Mix the icing sugar with the orange juice until smooth.
Add a little orange coloring to achieve the desired shade.
Use as a topping for cakes or pastries.

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.

Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Icing sugar: Provides the sweetness and bulk that give the icing its body.
Orange juice: Dissolves the sugar into a smooth, spreadable liquid and adds flavor.

“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.