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Chocolate Water Icing
Melt 3 ounces fine chocolate in a few spoonfuls water until creamy. Boil 2 cupfuls granulated sugar with 1 cupful water, without stirring, till it can be rolled in soft ball between fingers in cold water. Take from fire, stir for a moment till it becomes slightly cloudy. Add chocolate, and use at once on cake.
This is a poured fondant-style glaze rather than a buttercream: boiled sugar syrup beaten just to the point of clouding, then flavoured with melted chocolate and used before it sets. Everything depends on catching it at the right moment.
- The hinge: use it immediatelyOnce the syrup clouds it begins to crystallise, and within a minute or two it will be too stiff to pour. Have the cake cooled, level and within arm's reach before the syrup comes off the heat.
- Soft ball, by thermometerThe finger test described here means 234-240F. A candy thermometer does the same job without dipping fingers into syrup near 240F, which sticks and burns badly.
- Do not stir the syrupThe instruction is deliberate. Stirring while it boils seeds crystals and gives a grainy icing. If sugar crystals build on the pan sides, brush them down with a wet pastry brush instead.
- "Fine chocolate" hereMost likely block baking chocolate, unsweetened or only lightly sweetened, rather than modern eating chocolate; 'fine' may simply mean good quality. Unsweetened or 70% dark is the safer choice, since sweet milk chocolate will read as cloying against 2 cups of sugar.
- Melting itA few spoonfuls of water is enough to make a smooth paste over low heat or a water bath. Add the water at the start rather than dribbling it into already-melted chocolate, which can seize.
- "Slightly cloudy"Stir and watch for the gloss to dull and the syrup to turn from clear to opaque. That is the signal, and in a hot pan it may come very quickly.
- Cupful and ouncesCupfuls are 8 fl oz here, and the ounces of chocolate are by weight. The sugar and water are measured 2 to 1 by volume.
- YieldRoughly enough to glaze one 8- or 9-inch cake, or the tops of a batch of small cakes. If it stiffens in the pan, a little hot water stirred in will loosen it briefly.
Water icings -- sugar and water with no butter, egg or cream -- were a common finish in turn-of-the-century home baking, cheap and quick. This one sits at the boiled end of that family, essentially a small batch of fondant flavoured with chocolate. The finger-in-cold-water test for syrup stages was standard instruction well before thermometers were common household equipment.