Name: Orange Icing
Ingredients: 1 orange; 1 tablespoon hot water; powdered sugar

Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Icing

enough for one ordinary sized cake

Ingredients

1 orange
1 tablespoon hot water
powdered sugar

Directions

Grate the rind of the orange and soak it in 1 tablespoon of hot water for 15 minutes.
Squeeze the juice from the orange and combine it with the water from the rind.
Mix in powdered sugar until the mixture is thick enough for a spoon to stand upright.
This icing is enough for one ordinary sized cake.

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.

Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Orange: Provides the juice and rind, adding bright citrus flavour and aroma to the icing.
Powdered sugar: Sweetens the icing and thickens it so it holds its shape on a cake.

“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.