YALP!

[gnomi]

[Poll #1046408]

Comments

[farwing.livejournal.com]

That's the ______ on the cake!

Except that I would use 'icing' in this situation.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that's because that's how the idiom goes. :-)

[arfur]

it still made me double-take for 15 seconds.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Frosting has the consistency of paste and usually has a matte finish. Icing sets into a semi-hard shell, usually with a glossy finish.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

That's my distinction, too.

[samcdermott65.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

shari

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I recognize that this is a distinction when I'm bothering to draw the distinction. But in practice I usually don't encounter icing, and therefore use the two words interchangeably to refer to what's really frosting.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yup. Although I don't have the expectation that the person I'm talking to makes the same distinction.

[gingicat]

More or less.

[morgan-lowri.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

^_^

[violetcheetah.livejournal.com]

i don't tend to think of icing as semi-hard, but that's pretty much my distinction, too. for example, the stuff on a hostess cupcake is soft (well, when fresh), and not matte, but i think of that as icing.

that said, i grew up calling it icing. but then, i grew up with my mother making hers from scratch, and it was a thinner, glossier consistency, and tasted more like icing on, for example, cinnamon rolls. for a while, i thought of frosting as the store-bought stuff, or the stuff on store-bought cakes.

but then, i'm from three miles outside a town of 642 in kentucky.

[tygerseye.livejournal.com]

White icing and chocolate forsting. Don't ask me why, I'm odd I know. And don't ask me what I say when it's pink or white or blue or something... I can't recall. Icing I think... LOL

sugar!

[sarsmicama.livejournal.com]

icing is a cake, frosting is a cup-cake in my world. But there's no difference in the composition. I blame my mother. Nothing to blame her for, but she'd appreciate the thought :-D

[morgan-lowri.livejournal.com]

Icing is the thin glaze kind and frosting is the thick fluffy kind. ^_^

'The icing on the cake' is also a common metaphor around here.

[somehedgehog.livejournal.com]

Everything that goes on cake is frosting. With the following exceptions:

>Decorations and writing made in gooey confection may be referred to as icing. But not always.
>Any rolled out, fondant-like coating (the kind that can be peeled off wedding cakes and the like) is neither icing nor frosting. I don't know what it is, but it's not that.

On another note: If I was raised in region A with parents from regions B and C, should I only indicate I acquired language in region A

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

If you think that your parents being from B and/or C affected your idiolect, I say indicate 'em all! :-)

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

icing is more like a glaze and goes on in a thin(ner) layer, whereas frosting is the softer less shiny fluffy stuff. and now i want a cupcake. damn you.

[tober.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned... most creamy stuff applied as a paste to a cake is frosting (including all forms of buttercream, sweetened whipped cream, cream cheese-based preparations, etc). Royal icing is icing. If you cover a cake with ganache, I'd call that a coating - or, if push came to shove, icing, not frosting. Fondant is neither frosting nor icing.

"It's a cellular peptide cake with mint frosting."

[dpolicar]

In my lexicon, icing is a thin layer meant to highlight the taste of the cake; frosting is a thick layer meant to compete with it. Icing is more like a glaze, except for (of course) not being glazed.

[betra.livejournal.com]

I think of icing usually in context to royal icing or any sugary cake covering that gets hard or stiff. Almost anything else is frosting (unless it is a glaze or a fondit sort of thing) and is the stuff that stays fluffy and soft, and gets on your sleeve or elbow and you never know when or how it happened.

[lonfiction.livejournal.com]

Icing is the default for me, but occasionally cupcakes have frosting instead of icing in my world.

[half-double.livejournal.com]

"Where Would I Be?" is obviously the superior song.

Narf!

[aunt-becca.livejournal.com]

not to be NY-centric, but.....
icing is the yummy part of the real, NY black and white cookies. Shiny finish and can be peeled off in one piece if you fancy (we chowed down on these during out NYC visit!).
Frosting is that fluffy crap that you New Englanders put on your "half moon" cookies. Or the stuff you can eat right from the can :)
now I want another black and white....

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait. I think I answered wrong. I think I use "frosting" for opaque stuff and "icing" for translucent/transparent stuff. But I'm not sure. Growing up I always used "frosting" because that's what we put on cakes in my house.

[tapuz.livejournal.com]

I answered frosting, thinking that icing is the stuff that goes between the layers.

Am now agreeing with those who say it's a consistancy thing and icing is thin, whereas frosting is fluffy. In any case, ganache is different :-)

Oh, and on the last part -- my vote gots for a different song!

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Frosting is thick and fluffy; icing is thin and crunchy.

[cellio]

It's all icing. I have learned to parse "frosting" as a word some people not from here use for "icing", but I don't think I say it except in conversations like this.

[fizzixrat.livejournal.com]

Re: language-acquisition region...

I checked two of them, because a) I didn't completely understand the question and b) lived in one of those regions until age six, then the other for another twenty years. The first one is where the basic language acquisition occurred, but it altered a bit after moving to the second. Plus, one parent hailed from the first region, the other from the second.

[fizzixrat.livejournal.com]

And also, actually, I clicked the "South Atlantic" one because DE was where I did the first piece of language acquisition...but I lived in urban/suburban northern DE, where language is really a lot more like it is in southern PA (like Philly, for instance) and NJ than it is in southern/rural DE.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

The question is really "I learned English primarily in: (checkboxes to acommodate those who moved frequently during language acquisition)," but I took to shortening it in the last two polls out of sheer laziness.

Good to see you 'round these parts.