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Dessert

Frosting or Icing

A simple egg white frosting made with powdered sugar, optional lemon juice or tartaric acid, and optional food coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Frosting or Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Ensure the egg white and platter are cold.

Make the frosting

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

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

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

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

  5. For a whiter, frothier icing, 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. To decorate, reserve some icing and use a clean syringe to apply designs.

  4. Color reserved icing with food coloring as desired.

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

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg white
Whipped into a foam that forms the light, airy structure of the icing.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the whipped egg white to sweeten and stiffen the icing.
Lemon juice or tartaric acid
Acid stabilises the whipped egg white foam and helps it stay white and frothy.

The step that matters

Keep the egg white and platter cold. Cold egg white whips to a more stable foam with more volume, and cold surfaces help the icing hold its shape while it is beaten and spread.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. 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

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