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Strawberry Icing
4 tablespoons strawberry juice 1 cup sugar Boil until it threads and pour over whipped white of 1 egg.
This is a boiled frosting — what a modern kitchen would call an Italian meringue — with strawberry juice standing in for most of the water. Two lines of text hide the only tricky part: the temperature of the syrup.
- "Boil until it threads"Thread stage is roughly 230-235F on a candy thermometer (charts vary by a few degrees), when a spoonful drops from the spoon in a fine thread. Below that the icing stays soupy; much above it and you are into soft-ball and a stiff, candy-like frosting.
- The hinge: pour slowlyBeat the white to soft peaks first, then add the hot syrup in a thin stream down the side of the bowl with the mixer running. Dumping it in cooks the white into threads and the icing will never come smooth.
- Beat until coolThe recipe stops at "pour over," but keep beating five to eight minutes, until the bowl is no longer warm to the touch. The meringue thickens and gains gloss as it cools; spread it while it is still soft enough to swirl.
- The strawberry juiceCrush ripe berries and strain through a sieve or cloth — you want clear juice, not puree, or the pulp will weigh the meringue down. Thawed frozen berries release their juice more readily; roughly a cup of berries should give the 4 tablespoons needed, though yield varies with the fruit.
- Sugar and liquid ratioFour tablespoons is a quarter cup of liquid to a cup of sugar, which is a fairly dry syrup and will reach thread stage quickly. Watch it from the moment it clears rather than setting a timer.
- Egg whiteOne white makes a modest amount. The hot syrup heats it but does not reliably pasteurize it; use pasteurized whites if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- YieldA modest amount: roughly enough to cover the top of a single small layer or a few cupcakes. Double it if you want to fill and frost a two-layer cake.
- WeatherBoiled icings weep and stay tacky in humid air. Make it on a dry day, and serve the cake the same day — it crusts on the outside and softens overnight.
Boiled icing is often said to have been a mainstay of North American home baking from the late nineteenth century before buttercream came to dominate, and it survives in this book in a family of variations. Its appeal is generally traced to economy: a cup of sugar and a single egg white stretched further than butter-based frosting and produced a bright white, glossy finish that looked like a bakery cake. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and its frostings section reflects the same logic as the rest of the volume — cheap staple ingredients, a technique described in as few words as possible, and the assumption that the cook already knows what a sugar thread looks like. Fruit-flavoured versions may have come into their own in strawberry season.