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Almond Icing
½ cup butter 1 egg (white) ½ teaspoon almond extract 2 cups icing sugar Cream butter, beat white of egg stiff, add almond flavouring and sugar. Stir in gradually. If too stiff, add a little milk.
Use ½ pound almonds burnt and rolled.
Cover cake with icing and roll in nutmeats.
A buttercream in the older style, thickened with raw egg white and finished with crushed caramelised almonds. The egg is the problem: nothing in this icing is ever heated.
- Raw egg whiteThe beaten white goes into the icing uncooked and stays that way on the finished cake, often at room temperature for a day or more. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, inside; there is no step here that brings the white anywhere near the 160F at which that risk is controlled. Use a current uncooked-icing recipe instead.
- Icing sugarThe same thing as confectioners' or powdered sugar. Modern boxes contain cornstarch as an anti-caking agent, which may stiffen an icing slightly.
- "Burnt" almondsNot scorched. In this period burnt almonds meant nuts toasted dark and usually rolled in caramelised sugar, sold by confectioners as a sweetmeat. "Rolled" here probably means crushed under a rolling pin rather than chopped, though the text does not say.
- Half a pound of almondsAbout 1½ cups whole, closer to 2 cups once crushed, which is a heavy coating for one cake.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon in two cups of sugar is assertive by modern standards.
Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in connection with its Five Roses flour, and much of its contents was solicited from Canadian housewives, which explains the telegraphic style and the wide variation in how much a contributor bothered to explain. Almond icing in a book like this can mean one of two quite different things: the cooked marzipan paste laid under royal icing on a British fruit cake, or, as here, a butter icing simply flavoured with almond extract and dressed with nuts. "Burnt almonds" were a confectioner's line, and pressing crushed nuts onto a frosted cake was a familiar North American finish.