Name: Vienna Icing
Ingredients: ½ lb fresh butter; 10 oz icing sugar; any flavoring of your choice; 1 tablespoon liqueur

Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Vienna Icing

Ingredients

½ lb fresh butter
10 oz icing sugar
any flavoring of your choice
1 tablespoon liqueur

Directions

In a bowl, cream together the fresh butter and icing sugar using a wooden spoon.
Add your chosen flavoring and the liqueur, mixing until well combined.
Use the icing 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.

Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 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

Fresh butter: Creamed with sugar to give the icing its rich, smooth body and fat-based mouthfeel.
Icing sugar: Provides sweetness and, when creamed with butter, a soft, spreadable structure.
Liqueur: Adds flavor and aroma and loosens the icing slightly for easier mixing.

“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.