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Glace Frosting
1/2 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons water, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Put sugar and water in small saucepan, place on range, stir until sugar is dissolved, bring to boiling point and boil without stirring until syrup when tried in cold water will form a ball of jelly-like consistency. Turn into a bowl, cool, then beat, using a wooden spoon until mixture is thick and white. Put bowl in saucepan of boiling water, and stir until icing is thin enough to pour; then add vanilla. Pour over cake and spread.
This is poured fondant under another name: a sugar syrup cooked to soft ball, beaten to an opaque paste, then loosened over hot water. The whole thing depends on stopping the syrup at the right point and on not overheating it afterwards.
- The hinge: soft-ball stage"A ball of jelly-like consistency" in cold water corresponds to what is now called the soft-ball stage, about 236-240F on a thermometer. Cooked much beyond that, the finished icing tends to set hard and dull rather than pour smoothly.
- Do not stir the boiling syrupThe instruction to boil without stirring is not fussiness. Agitation before the syrup has cooled seeds large sugar crystals and the frosting turns gritty. Wipe stray crystals from the pan sides with a wet brush instead.
- Cool before beatingLet the syrup drop to roughly lukewarm, around 100-110F, before you start working it. Beating while hot gives coarse grain; beating cold gives a stiff mass you cannot move. A wooden spoon still works better than a whisk here.
- "Place on range"Simply the stovetop. Use the smallest saucepan you have with a heavy base; three tablespoons of water in a wide pan will boil away before the sugar is properly cooked.
- Warming to pourThe recipe sets the bowl in a saucepan of boiling water; a bowl resting over the water is gentler. Either way, only until the icing flows off the spoon in a ribbon. Overheated fondant loses its sheen and sets chalky. A few drops of hot water thin it further if needed.
- Flavour lastVanilla goes in at the end because alcohol-based extract flashes off in a hot syrup. The same applies to any liqueur or almond extract you substitute.
- YieldRoughly half a cup of icing, enough to glaze the top of a single small layer; double it for the top and sides of a two-layer cake.
- Work quickly on the cakePoured fondant skins over within a minute or two. Have the cake cooled, crumb-free and level, and spread with a single pass of an offset spatula rather than repeated smoothing.
Choice Recipes was one of the pamphlet cookbooks issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the long-established American chocolate firm, as advertising for its cocoa and baking chocolate; the collections drew on well-known cooking-school teachers of the day, including Maria Parloa, and circulated free or for a few cents. Glace frosting takes its name from the French glace, ice, and is essentially a small batch of fondant, the same sugar-boiling technique confectioners used for bonbon centres, thinned enough to pour.