Home › Cake Making and Baking › Icing (Tablespoons cream teaspoon)
Icing (Tablespoons cream teaspoon)
1 cup icing sugar. 1/2 cup butter. 3 tablespoons cream 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Put all in a bowl, and set in hot water until melted. Cut the cake in squares, dip in icing, then in rolled peanuts that have previously been browned. See Coffee Icing.
The ingredient list has been truncated in the original printing — only the cream and vanilla survive, and the bulk of the icing (almost certainly confectioners' sugar with chocolate or butter) is missing. What follows is what can be said honestly about the method.
- The missing ingredientsThree tablespoons of cream and a teaspoon of vanilla cannot be "set in hot water until melted" on their own; something solid is meant to melt, and the printed page does not say what or how much. The cross-reference to "Coffee Icing" is the only guide the book gives, and the amounts should not be guessed at as fact.
- "Set in hot water"This is a bain-marie: the bowl rests in a pan of hot, not boiling, water so the sugar dissolves and the fat softens without the icing breaking or graining. Direct heat on the stove will scorch the sugar and stiffen the icing before you can dip anything.
- Dipping consistencyFor dipping small squares the icing wants to coat the back of a spoon and fall in a ribbon — roughly the thickness of heavy cream. Too thick and it drags crumbs off the cut sides; too thin and it soaks in. Keep the bowl over the hot water while you work, as it stiffens as it cools.
- Cutting the cakeA day-old, close-grained cake cuts far more cleanly than a fresh one. Trim the crusts, cut squares of about 1 1/2 inches, and chill them briefly so the cut faces are firm before dipping.
- "Rolled peanuts"Peanuts crushed with a rolling pin, not ground to a paste. The recipe says only that they should be browned beforehand; brown them in a dry pan or a moderate oven, rub off the skins in a towel, then crush.
- YieldWorking method -- Work over a rack set on a tray so the drips can be scraped back into the bowl.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who baked with Five Roses flour, which explains the compressed, elliptical style here and the cross-reference to "Coffee Icing": the book assumes a reader working through a whole chapter of icings at once, borrowing proportions from one entry to finish another. Why this recipe's ingredient list is missing is not clear.