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Icing, Vienna
Beat six ounces of fresh butter to a cream, add to it half a pound of icing sugar, a dessert-spoonful of brandy, and one of maraschino or other liqueur. Work this with a wooden spoon until creamy, and colour it if desired. This icing does not dry like the ordinary icing, but remains creamy. It can be squeezed on cakes and pastry through a forcing bag to form any required design or motto.
This is a straightforward butter icing — what a modern kitchen would call a simple buttercream — and it works exactly as written. A few notes on proportions and handling.
- Quantities in cupsSix ounces of butter is one and a half US sticks; half a pound of icing sugar is roughly 1¾ to 2 cups sifted. A dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons, so you are adding around four teaspoons of spirits in total.
- Icing sugarThis is confectioners' or powdered sugar, sold today with a little cornstarch already in it. Sift it before beating or the icing will pipe with grit and block a fine tube.
- Butter temperature is the hingeThe butter must be genuinely soft — around 65F — before the sugar goes in. Too cold and it stays granular and refuses to hold an air structure; too warm or melted and it will slump off the cake rather than holding a piped edge.
- MaraschinoThe book means the clear, dry cherry-kernel liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Kirsch, rum or a good orange liqueur all substitute directly. Add the liquid slowly at the end; adding much more than the recipe calls for risks curdling the mixture.
- If it splitsA butter icing that looks curdled has taken the liquid too fast or too cold. Keep beating, or warm the outside of the bowl briefly with your hand, and it will come back together.
- ColouringUse gel or paste colour rather than liquid — the water in liquid colour is the same enemy as too much liqueur, and this mixture has no tolerance for extra.
- Forcing bagBecause it never sets, the piping must be right first time; there is no crust to trim. Chill piped work for ten minutes to firm it before moving the cake.
- Yield and keepingEnough to fill and thinly cover a small cake, or to pipe decoration on two dozen small cakes. It keeps a week refrigerated but must be brought back to room temperature and re-beaten before piping.
Butter-and-sugar icings arrived comparatively late in the English confectioner's repertoire — the older tradition was royal icing, egg white beaten with sugar until it dried to a hard white shell that could be cut with a knife and would keep a wedding cake respectable for months. Cassell's is careful to say what the Vienna sort does not do: it "does not dry like the ordinary icing, but remains creamy," which tells you which one a Victorian reader assumed was ordinary. The Viennese name reflects the prestige of Austrian pastry work in nineteenth-century Britain, when Vienna was widely regarded as a byword for fine cake-making and its name was attached to bread, rolls and coffee alike as a mark of refinement; the attribution is conventional rather than a claim about any particular Viennese kitchen. The maraschino is a period signature — a colourless liqueur distilled from Dalmatian marasca cherries and their crushed stones, then fashionable enough that Victorian recipes reach for it the way a modern one reaches for vanilla.