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Almond Icing for Bride's Cake
Put 8 ounces almond paste into a bowl, and add 16 ounces of crushed and sifted sugar. Then add enough egg whites, unbeaten, to make a stiff paste. working, add gradually 1 teaspoon rose water.
While -Mrs. A. W. Fraser, Iron Springs, Alta.
A two-line marzipan for the layer that goes between a bride's cake and its royal icing. The proportions are sound, but the binder is not: the egg whites are added raw and the paste is never cooked or heated at any point.
- Why this one failsUnbeaten raw egg white is the only liquid, and there is no heat step anywhere in the method to reduce Salmonella that may be present on shell eggs. Almond paste applied under royal icing is also typically held unrefrigerated while the icing dries and the cake keeps. Use a current marzipan recipe instead.
- The proportions, for referenceTwo parts sugar to one part almond paste by weight, as here, is at the sugar-heavy end of covering pastes; more sugar gives a firmer, drier paste, which is generally held to take royal icing better without almond oil bleeding through.
- "Crushed and sifted sugar"In this period this meant loaf or lump sugar pounded fine and put through a sieve — the household equivalent of what is now sold as icing or confectioners' sugar. Modern powdered sugar also contains cornstarch, which the original would not have had.
- Almond paste is not marzipanAlmond paste, then and now, is roughly equal almonds and sugar, coarse and pliable. This recipe is the step that turns it into marzipan by working in twice its weight of sugar.
- Rose waterA common flavouring in confectionery of the period. A teaspoon in a pound and a half of paste gives a light background note rather than a pronounced floral one.
- YieldTwenty-four ounces of paste, plus the whites — enough to sheet a single 8- or 9-inch round cake, top and sides, at the thickness usual under royal icing.
A bride's cake in this period meant the dark, heavily fruited keeping cake of the British tradition, and it was generally not iced directly: a layer of almond paste went on first to seal the fruit and give the brittle white royal icing a smooth, non-greasy bed to set against. The technique is usually said to have travelled to Canada with British settlement, and the Five Roses Cook Book "u2014 issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and assembled from recipes sent in by women across the Dominion — is full of such transplanted domestic habits. The attribution to Mrs. A. W. Fraser of Iron Springs, Alberta, is the whole point of the book's method: prairie homesteads only a few years old, supplying the recipes that came with them. The garbled line in the middle of the text cannot be assigned with confidence to either the original printing or a later transcription.