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Fruit Juice Frosting
Beat the yolk of an egg with three tablespoonfuls of any fruit juice, add enough confectioners' sugar to make the frosting of the right consistency to spread. Strawberry or raspberry juice make a pretty pink frosting.
This frosting is built on a raw egg yolk that is never heated at any point, and it is spread on a cake that will then sit out. That is the whole problem with it.
- The yolk is never cookedNothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature: the yolk is beaten with juice, thickened with sugar, and spread. Salmonella in the yolk is not addressed by any step here, and shell eggs were not pasteurized.
- Sugar and fruit acid do not make it safeConfectioners' sugar lowers water activity and berry juice adds acid, but not to levels that reliably kill pathogens in a soft spreadable icing. A cooked or boiled frosting reaches a temperature that matters; this one does not.
- It then sits at room temperatureA frosted cake left out is a moist, egg-based coating held between roughly 40F and 140F, the range in which bacteria multiply.
- The quantities are unusable anywayThe quantities are incomplete — "Enough confectioners' sugar" and "any fruit juice" leave the sugar quantity, the yield and the amount of cake covered unspecified, so the finished volume cannot be reproduced accurately even setting the egg aside.
- What to do insteadUse a current recipe for a fruit-juice glaze or a cooked meringue-style icing. Do not attempt to adapt this one by adjusting the sugar or chilling it.
Uncooked egg-and-sugar icings appear in household books well into the twentieth century, and part of their appeal was speed: no double boiler, no sugar syrup taken to the thread stage, no thermometer. A yolk beaten with a liquid and stiffened with fine sugar gave gloss and body in a couple of minutes. The appeal of berry juice was chiefly colour — strawberry and raspberry juice were an ordinary way to get pink, alongside beet and cochineal. The practice faded as egg safety guidance tightened and as confectioners' sugar glazes made with milk or juice alone proved to do the same decorative job without the yolk.