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Caramel Icing (No. 1)
2 cups granulated sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup milk Boil for ¼ hour, cool a little, add vanilla to taste, and put on cake before it is cold.
This is a boiled fudge-style icing — sugar, butter and milk cooked to the soft-ball stage, then spread while still warm. The original gives a time where a thermometer serves better.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockA quarter hour is a rough proxy for the soft-ball stage, roughly 236-240F. Burner output and pan width vary enough that timing alone will give you either syrup or a brick; use a candy thermometer and pull it at 238F.
- Pan choiceUse a heavy-bottomed saucepan at least three times the volume of the ingredients. Sugar and milk foam up sharply and scorch on thin metal, and scorched milk solids will taint the whole batch.
- "Cool a little" means about 110F"Cool a little" is left unspecified -- for fudge-type mixtures the usual modern guidance is to wait until the pan is merely warm rather than hot (around 110F). The original does not direct any beating; if you do beat while the mixture is still hot, you risk coarse crystals and a gritty icing.
- Spread warmThe instruction to put it on the cake before it is cold is the hinge of the recipe. This icing sets hard within a few minutes of thickening; if it stiffens in the pan, warm it gently with a spoonful of milk and work quickly.
- Where the caramel comes fromThere is no browned sugar here; the flavour comes from the milk sugars and butter cooking together, which is why the finished icing is pale tan rather than dark.
- VanillaAdd it after the boiling is done and the mixture has cooled slightly, as the original directs; alcohol-based extract added to boiling syrup loses much of its aroma. About a teaspoon suits this quantity.
- YieldEnough to fill and cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake, or to top a 9x13 sheet.
The em>Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses flour, and was compiled from recipes contributed by users of the flour across Canada -- which is why the instructions assume a great deal of shared knowledge and specify almost nothing. Boiled icings of this type were common before electric mixers made buttercream easy: sugar, butter and milk cooked to the soft-ball stage and beaten by hand gave a firm finish. Closely related formulas appear under headings such as "maple icing" or "penuche" depending on the sweetener used.