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Icing for Dream Biscuits
1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon vanilla 3 tablespoons cream Icing sugar to thicken.
Four lines of ingredients and no method at all, which was normal for a filler recipe printed beside the cookie it belongs to. The proportions are sound; everything depends on how much icing sugar you work in.
- Icing sugarCanadian and British usage for what American shelves call confectioners' or powdered sugar, usually sifted and cut with a little cornstarch. The amount is left to the cook; with 3 tablespoons cream, a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of vanilla, expect to work in something on the order of two to three cups before it is spreadable. Add it gradually and stop when the icing holds a soft ridge.
- "Biscuits" here means cookiesIn the Canadian idiom of this book a biscuit is a small sweet baked good, not the American quick bread. This is a soft cookie glaze, not something for a breakfast roll.
- The butter must be soft, not meltedMelted butter separates out and leaves the icing greasy and dull. Cream it with a spoon until smooth, then beat in the cream before any sugar goes in.
- A tablespoon of vanilla is deliberateA tablespoon of vanilla is a great deal -- roughly three times the usual flavouring dose, and it is what carries the icing. Whether that is intended or a printer's slip for a teaspoon cannot be told from the page; with a strong modern extract, start with two teaspoons and taste before committing to the full spoonful.
- CreamThe recipe does not specify which. Canadian table cream is 18 per cent fat and something in that range is the likely intention; American light cream is the nearest equivalent. Heavy cream gives a richer, slightly stiffer icing and will take marginally less sugar.
- Consistency and yieldThis makes roughly a cup to a cup and a half, enough to top two to three dozen small cookies thinly. For a glaze that runs and sets flat, hold back sugar; for a spreadable frosting, keep adding until it stands up on the spoon.
- SettingAn uncooked butter-and-cream icing of this kind sets soft rather than hard. Leave the finished cookies uncovered for an hour before stacking, and separate the layers with paper.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell Five Roses flour, and was compiled from recipes contributed by users of the flour. Uncooked butter icings of this kind spread in home baking once finely milled icing sugar became cheap and reliably available in packets; before that, a cook wanting a smooth white finish generally had to pound and sift loaf sugar herself, or fall back on a boiled sugar-and-egg-white frosting. A four-ingredient icing that needs no thermometer and no cooking is a small marker of that shift.