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Chocolate Icing
¼ pound chocolate powder 1 tablespoon water ¼ pound icing sugar Put chocolate and water into saucepan, and stir until melted. Add quickly icing sugar, and spread over cake with knife dipped in hot water.
A two-ingredient glaze that comes together in under five minutes, with one genuine ambiguity in the ingredient list.
- "Chocolate powder"Ambiguous. In this period it likely meant a sweetened drinking-chocolate powder, or possibly finely grated sweet eating chocolate, rather than modern unsweetened cocoa. With cocoa powder alone the tablespoon of water is unlikely to give a spreadable glaze, and the result will taste harsh; a sweetened chocolate, finely chopped, is probably the closer match.
- Weights, not cups¼ pound is 4 oz of each. Four ounces of icing sugar is roughly a cup; weigh it if you can, since sifted and unsifted cups differ noticeably.
- Icing sugarThe British and Canadian name for confectioners' or powdered sugar, which already contains a little starch. It is not superfine granulated sugar, which will stay gritty here.
- Gentle heat is the hingeThe saucepan goes over the lowest possible flame, or better, a bowl over barely simmering water. Overheated chocolate turns grainy and thick, and it does not come back with stirring.
- The tablespoon of waterThat is barely enough liquid, and the icing will stiffen the moment the sugar goes in. Have another tablespoon or two of hot water ready and add it a teaspoon at a time until the mixture falls thickly from the spoon.
- Work while it is warmThis is a glaze, not a buttercream — it sets as it cools. Spread immediately, and the trick of dipping the knife in hot water is worth following exactly; it is what gives the smooth surface.
- YieldRoughly half a pound of icing, likely enough for the top of one 8- or 9-inch layer, or a batch of small cakes.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, a flour miller's promotional book compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives; it went through many printings from the 1910s onward and was for decades one of the most widely owned cookbooks in Canada. The vagueness of "chocolate powder" reflects a market in transition: since the invention of the hydraulic cocoa press in the Netherlands in the 1820s, defatted chocolate could be sold as a powder, and by 1900 grocers stocked sweetened drinking powders, unsweetened cocoa and cakes of sweet chocolate side by side, all of them loosely called chocolate. A frosting of nothing but chocolate, sugar and water also belongs to a period when butter was dear and eggs seasonal — the cheapest possible way to finish a plain cake and make it look like an occasion.