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Dessert

Sugar Icing for Cakes

A sugar icing made from egg whites, powdered sugar, and starch, applied to cakes and dried in a cool oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sugar Icing for Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. Gradually sift in the powdered sugar.

  3. Add the finely powdered starch and beat until smooth.

Spread and dry

  1. Spread the icing evenly over the cakes with a spoon or broad knife.

  2. Place the cakes in a cool oven to dry and harden without coloring.

  3. If applied immediately after baking, the icing will harden as the cakes cool.

  4. Optionally, color the icing with strawberry or currant juice, or prepared cochineal.

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 + 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

Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the foam to form a sweet icing that sets firm as it dries.
Fine starch
Fine powder that stabilizes the icing and helps it dry smooth and firm.

The step that matters

Keep the oven cool while drying the icing. Egg white and sugar set and harden at low heat, while higher heat would brown the icing, which the recipe says to avoid. Gentle drying keeps the surface pale and smooth.

“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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