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Dessert

Frosting or Icing

A simple egg white and powdered sugar frosting for cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Frosting or Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the frosting

  1. Ensure the egg white and bowl are cold.

  2. Add a small handful of powdered sugar to the egg white as you begin to beat it.

  3. Continue adding the sugar at intervals until fully incorporated.

  4. If the frosting is too thin, beat in more powdered sugar.

  5. If the icing becomes too stiff, thin it with a little water.

  6. For a whiter, frothier frosting, add lemon juice or tartaric acid while beating.

Apply and decorate

  1. Spread the frosting evenly over the cake with a broad knife.

  2. Apply a second coat after the first has dried slightly.

  3. Dry the cake in a cool oven with the door open or in a drafty area.

  4. To decorate, reserve some icing and use a clean glass syringe to create designs.

  5. Color reserved icing with food coloring as desired.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Saffron + spinachtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Saffron + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together185 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Whipped with sugar to form a foam that gives the frosting its light, airy structure.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the whipped egg white to add sweetness and body that thickens the frosting.

The step that matters

Keeping the egg white and bowl cold. Cold egg white whips to a more stable foam with greater volume, so the frosting holds its shape better once sugar is added.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, saffron, orange, spinach, chocolate):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Cherryfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, saffron, orange, spinach, chocolate. 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.

More frosting recipes

Chocolate 117Boiled 73Cake 60Caramel 43Eggless 36Gelatin 30 See all 14 →

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