Frosting [Glacé]

Note Profile

Prepared

About

Frosting is the uncooked sugar-and-fat coating on a cake, from a plain glacé of icing sugar and water to a whipped buttercream. It smells of powdered sugar and vanilla with a butter richness behind it, and nothing in it is browned. It is the sweetest and lightest of the dessert accords, used as a lift rather than a body.

Scent Profile

Intensely sweet vanilla-sugar, with a dry powdery quality that comes straight from the icing sugar it is made of, and a soft lactonic butteriness behind it. A small creamy-woody roundness, an almond-like nutty touch and a thin citrus-rind lift from the lemon that a glacé is often made with. Coumarin gives a faint hay-sweet depth. There is no burnt, smoky or caramelised facet anywhere in it.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~8h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand, Floral

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

A prepared confection with no extract. A glacé icing is confectioners' sugar beaten with water or lemon juice; buttercream is fat beaten into powdered sugar; royal icing uses egg white. Perfumery builds the note from vanillin as the spine, coumarin for a soft spiced depth, ethyl maltol for the spun-sugar lift, and lactones for the butter.

Usage in Perfumery

Perfumers use frosting in the heart of playful gourmand and bakery compositions to add sugar without weight. It sits over cake, marshmallow and fruit accords and gives them a sherbet-fine dusting rather than a caramel base. It is also used at low dose to sweeten florals in body-care and youth fragrance.