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Beating Bowl
5. For small cakes the oven should be pretty hot; for larger cakes only moderately so. If a broom-straw, pushed through the thick part of the cake, comes out clean and free from dough, the cake is done. [38] 6. When you take the cake from the oven, do not remove from the pans until it is somewhat cool not sooner than fifteen minutes. When you take it from the pans, do not turn it over; set it down on a clean cloth, on its bottom, and cover with another clean cloth.
These directions have as many parts as an old-fashioned sermon. Fortunately they are not so long.
III. Icing, Glazing and Ornamenting. 1. A GLAZED shallow earthen dish should be used in making the icing. 2. Allow a full quarter of a pound, or more, of the finest white sugar to the white of each egg. 3. Lemon-juice and tartaric acid whiten the icing. If used, more sugar will be required. 4. Sprinkle the egg with part of the sugar, and beat, adding more sugar from time to time. If you use flavoring, add it last. 5. Dredge the cake thoroughly with flour after it is baked; then wipe it carefully before icing or frosting. It will then spread more kindly. 6. Put the frosting on in large spoonfuls. Begin in the center and spread with a thin bladed knife or spatula, dipped from time to time in ice-water. 7. Let the frosting dry in a cool place.
IV. Recipes for Frosting.
TAKE the whites of eight eggs; beat to a stiff and perfect froth. Add pulverized white sugar, two pounds; starch, one tablespoonful; pulverized gum Arabic, one-half ounce, and the juice of a lemon. Sift sugar, starch and gum Arabic into the beaten eggs, and stir until perfectly firm.
Beat the white of an egg until you can turn the plate over without the egg running off, then add five heaping tablespoonfuls of pulverized sugar and one of starch. This quantity will frost one small cake. Flavor to taste. Glazing. Put into a porcelain or other glazed vessel, with a little water, the white of one egg well beaten, and stirred well into the water; let it boil, and whilst boiling, throw in a few drops of cold water. Then stir in a cupful of pounded sugar. This must boil to a foam, then be used; this makes a nice glace for cakes. V. Ornamenting Cakes.
For figures or flowers, beat up two eggs, reserving a third (white) till the cake has become dry after icing. Then insert a clean glass syringe into the remainder, and direct as you choose over the iced cake. Dry again. Ripe fruit may be laid on the icing when about half dry, with a very pretty effect, such as berries, etc. Save a little icing out, dilute with rosewater, and put on when that first done is dry. It gives a smooth, gloss.
The ornamentation may be colored pink by mixing a very little carmine or strawberry juice in the egg. The yellow rind of lemons, put in a bag and squeezed hard into the icing will give a yellow. So will a little butter-color, or preparation of anatto. For raised figures formed of frosting, a cone of strong white paper, rolled, with a proper orifice at the bottom, answers well, since it may be held upright, and easily directed to make the desired figures.
VI. Special Preparations.
CHOCOLATE preparation is made as directed for other frosting, with the whites of two eggs, one and a half cupfuls of best white ground sugar, six tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate and two tablespoonfuls of vanilla. Spread between the layers and on top of the cake, and serve while fresh, or when not more than one day old.
These are the cake-finishing pages of a general household manual: oven notes, then three frostings, a glaze and directions for piping. Nearly all of it is workable technique, but every frosting here is built on raw egg white that is never cooked.
- Raw egg white is the problemThe two main frostings beat uncooked whites with sugar and are then simply left to dry in a cool place. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and drying at room temperature does not sterilise. The chocolate preparation is the same mixture, spread between layers and held up to a day.
- The glaze is no saferThe glaze is closer to cooked but still not reliable -- the beaten white and water are boiled, cold water is thrown in, and after the cupful of sugar is stirred in the mixture is boiled again to a foam. No temperature or holding time is measured, so it cannot be treated as a controlled cook; a current royal-icing or buttercream recipe is the safer choice.
- Oven temperaturesThe text gives only "pretty hot" for small cakes and "moderately so" for larger ones, with no numbers. Such terms are usually read today as roughly 400-425F and about 350F, but that is an approximation supplied from outside the book. The broom-straw test is the toothpick test, and still valid.
- Cooling in the panFifteen minutes in the tin is still standard for butter cakes. The recipe says to set the cake down on its bottom on a clean cloth and cover it with a second cloth, without explaining why; a rack is the modern equivalent and carries less risk of a soggy base.
- "Finest white sugar" and "pulverized"Both mean sugar ground to a powder, the ancestor of confectioners' sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar already contains cornstarch, so the separate tablespoonful of starch called for here would be largely redundant today.
- Gum Arabic and tartaric acidGum Arabic (acacia gum) is still sold as a powder for confectionery and gives a hard, glossy set. The recipe credits lemon juice and tartaric acid only with whitening the icing, and notes that using them means more sugar is needed; acid is also commonly said to help keep sugar from graining, the role cream of tartar plays now.
- Anatto and carmineAnnatto is the seed colouring still used in cheese and butter; carmine is cochineal, an insect-derived red that some eaters avoid. "Butter-color" was a commercial annatto tint sold to dairies.
- The glass syringe and the paper coneThe syringe was a period piping tool. The rolled paper cone described at the end is the parchment cornet still used for fine line work, and it is the better of the two.
- QuantitiesEight whites to two pounds of sugar is a very large batch, enough for a substantial tiered or layer cake. The second, smaller formula (one white, five heaped tablespoonfuls of sugar) is the household scale.
What this page calls frosting is close to what later cookbooks standardised as royal icing: egg white beaten with powdered sugar until it sets hard, the finish behind the Victorian wedding or christening cake. The gum Arabic and starch point to an older, more confectioner's approach, meant to produce a surface firm enough to hold piped scrollwork and to survive being carried to table. The recipe also tells you to dredge the baked cake with flour and then wipe it carefully, so that the icing will "spread more kindly." The rolled paper cone described here predates the widespread sale of metal piping tips and is still the tool a pastry cook reaches for when the line has to be thin.