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Icings Boiled Icing

A simple icing made by boiling sugar and water, then adding egg white and optional flavorings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Coconut and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,107 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Icings Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil until it reaches a string consistency.

  3. Remove from heat and beat in the egg white.

Finish and serve

  1. Add flavoring, nuts, coconut, chocolate, or candies as desired.

  2. Use immediately to frost cakes.

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. Coconut + chocolatetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Nuts + chocolatetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Nuts + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the syrup and sets into a sweet, glossy coating as it cools.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so the syrup can be boiled to the right concentration.
Egg white
Beaten into the hot syrup to lighten the icing and give it a fluffy texture.

The step that matters

Boiling to string consistency. Boiling sugar syrup to the right concentration controls how the icing sets. Too little boiling leaves it runny, while too much makes it hard and grainy once it cools.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Macadamia nutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Peanutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, coconut, 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.

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