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Chocolate Icing
To vanilla icing add 1 tablespoon cold water. Melt one ounce Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, and add one-fourth cup confectioner's sugar and one tablespoon hot water. Place over fire, stir until smooth and add another tablespoon hot water; then add to vanilla icing.
An add-on rather than a standalone recipe: it converts a plain vanilla icing into a chocolate one. The technique of thinning melted chocolate with water in stages is the whole point, and it is easy to get wrong.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in cakes to be broken up and weighed. Substitute one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate; do not use semisweet or cocoa powder, since the sugar and fat balance is different.
- Chocolate and waterA little water hitting melted chocolate can make it seize into a grainy paste. Here the confectioner's sugar and the first tablespoon of hot water go in together, and the second tablespoon only after the mixture is stirred smooth, which keeps the water from hitting bare chocolate.
- "Place over fire"Use the lowest possible heat, or better, a bowl set over barely simmering water. Unsweetened chocolate scorches easily, and once it tastes burnt nothing recovers it.
- The tablespoon of cold waterIt goes into the vanilla icing before the chocolate, to loosen it. Chocolate and confectioner's sugar together stiffen an icing considerably, and without that slack you will be spreading something closer to fudge.
- The vanilla icing itselfThe book assumes you already have one made from elsewhere in its pages. Any confectioner's sugar icing will take this addition; as a rough working base, about a cup and a half of sifted sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla, and enough cream or water to bring it to spreading consistency. If your base icing is one built on uncooked egg white, be aware of that separately.
- Temperature when spreadingWork while the mixture is warm and fluid. It sets fast as the chocolate cools and firms, so have the cake ready before you combine the two.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much vanilla icing you start with, so the yield depends entirely on your base; the chocolate addition itself is only about a quarter cup.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate mills back to the 1760s and by the turn of the twentieth century was the best-known chocolate name in the United States. Choice Recipes was a promotional booklet: recipes collected under the company's imprint, each one naming its products by grade, so that Premium No. 1 (plain, unsweetened) and the sweetened German's chocolate appear as branded ingredients rather than generic ones. The habit of loosening chocolate with sugar and hot water instead of butter or cream belongs to an era when unsweetened chocolate was the default form sold to households, and every icing, sauce and cake had to build in its own sugar. The result is a thin, glossy, water-based icing much closer to a glaze than to the buttercreams that would eventually displace it, though just when that shift took hold is hard to pin down.