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Dessert

Fondant Icing for Small Cakes

Fondant icing for small cakes is a glaze made from egg white, fruit sugar, fondant, and optional flavoring and coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fondant Icing for Small Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the seal

  1. Beat the egg white slightly and mix in the fruit sugar.

  2. Apply the mixture to the cut edges of the cooled cake and let it stand overnight.

Ice and decorate

  1. Melt the fondant over hot water, stirring continuously.

  2. Thin the fondant slightly with a little hot water and add flavoring and coloring as desired.

  3. Carefully lower each cake into the fondant using a fork, avoiding covering the bottom.

  4. Quickly invert the cake and slip it off the fork.

  5. Decorate with nut meat, candied violets, candied fruit, or ornamental 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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  2. Egg + meattop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + meattop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Forms a sealing glaze that binds the fruit sugar to the cut cake edges.
Fruit sugar
Sweetens the seal mixture and helps it set into a firm coating.
Fondant
Forms the smooth, sweet outer icing layer over the cake.

The step that matters

Lowering the cake into the fondant. Fondant must be fluid but not too thin so it coats evenly; lowering the cake carefully on a fork and inverting it quickly keeps the coating smooth and avoids covering the bottom.

“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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