Home › Supper › Cream for Ice Cream Cake
Cream for Ice Cream Cake
Pour one-half pint boiling water over three cups of granulated or pulverized sugar and boil until one spoonful placed on a cold plate will stir to a thick cream. Pour this over the whites of four eggs beaten to a stiff froth and stir until creamy and cold; add one-half teaspoon of tartaric acid, flavor to taste, spread between the cakes and cover the top with the same. This is enough for two loaves and is splendid. The sugar and water must not be stirred until done and ready to mix with the eggs.
This is a boiled icing — an Italian meringue in all but name — and it behaves exactly as one. The syrup stage and the hands-off rule about stirring are the whole recipe.
- The hinge: do not stir the syrupOnce the sugar has dissolved, any agitation seeds crystals and the icing turns grainy. Wash the sides of the pan down with a wet brush instead, and leave the spoon out until the syrup is poured.
- Half a pintOne cup of boiling water to three cups of sugar. Granulated is fine; "pulverized" is old usage for a finer-milled sugar, not modern powdered sugar with cornstarch in it.
- "Stir to a thick cream" on a cold plateRoughly the soft-ball stage, in the region of 238F, though the recipe gives no temperature and relies on the plate test alone. A drop cooled on a saucer should hold together and smear thickly rather than run or set hard.
- Tartaric acidHalf a teaspoon of tartaric acid is stronger and more soluble than cream of tartar; if you substitute, use about a teaspoon of cream of tartar. Note that here it goes in after the syrup has been cooked and poured, not during boiling.
- Pouring the syrupAdd it to the beaten whites in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl, with the mixer running. Dumping it in cooks the whites into threads.
- Beating until coldExpect eight to twelve minutes on a stand mixer. Stopping early leaves an icing that slumps off the sides of the cake.
- Egg whitesThe hot syrup heats the whites considerably but does not reliably pasteurize them. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites.
- Yield and handlingEnough to fill and top two loaf-shaped layer cakes. Spread it while still spreadable — it firms with a thin crust within the hour and cracks if worked after that.
Despite the name, this has nothing to do with frozen dessert: in nineteenth-century American cookbooks "ice cream cake" could mean a cake iced with cream — that is, covered in a pale, glossy boiled icing. Acid turns up in period recipes for candy and frosting alike as a guard against a grainy result.