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Dessert

Chocolate Icing

A sweet icing made from sugar, egg whites, chocolate, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Beat the sugar into the egg whites until well combined.

  2. In a small pan, combine the chocolate, ⅓ cup sugar, and boiling water. Stir over medium heat until the mixture is smooth and glossy. Remove from heat.

  3. Stir the chocolate mixture into the beaten egg whites and sugar.

Frost the cake

  1. Use this icing to frost two sheets of 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.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Egg + chocolatetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to create a light, airy structure in the icing.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and helps stabilise the beaten egg whites.
Baker's chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and gives the icing its colour and richness.

The step that matters

Stirring the chocolate mixture into the egg whites. The chocolate mixture should be smooth and warm but not hot when added. Adding it too hot can cook or deflate the beaten egg whites, and lumps left in the chocolate will not blend into a smooth icing.

“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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