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Plain Frosting
1 cup fine powdered or confectioners, sugar 2 tablespoonfuls milk or warm water 1/4 teaspoonful vanilla THIS frosting is appropriate for plain cakes, coffee cakes, buns, ginger cakes, etc. It may be varied by using different flavors such as lemon juice, almond, rose or melted chocolate.
Rub the sugar free of all lumps, and add slowly just enough liquid to make a moderately thick paste. Water will make a more transparent frosting than milk.
Three ingredients and one real skill, which is stopping while the paste is still thick. This is a glaze rather than a buttercream, and several of the sweet doughs elsewhere in the book end by calling for it.
- Add the liquid by the half teaspoonTwo tablespoons to a cup of sugar is the outer figure, and the recipe is careful to say only enough to make a moderately thick paste. A cup of confectioners’ sugar travels from stiff to running inside a single teaspoon of liquid. Hold most of it back and thin at the end.
- Water or milk changes more than flavorThe booklet is right that water gives a more transparent frosting. Milk makes it opaque and white. On a hot brioche or tea ring, water lets the glaze sink in and dry nearly clear; on a dark ginger cake, where the frosting is meant to read as white, milk is the better choice.
- Rubbing out the lumpsConfectioners’ sugar now carries a little cornstarch to keep it free-flowing, so it is far less lumpy than the sugar this instruction was written against. Pushing it through a sieve is still worth the half minute, because a lump that survives into the paste will not dissolve later.
- Flavorings count as part of the liquidLemon juice is listed among the variations, and it replaces some of the milk or water rather than joining it. Melted chocolate does the same and then stiffens the glaze further as it cools, so it needs a little more liquid than the plain version. Rose means rose water, which was once as ordinary in a home baker’s cupboard as vanilla and now has to be sought out.
- Spread it hotThe brioche recipe in this book says to ice while hot, and that holds for any of these. A warm surface thins the glaze enough to be pushed about with the back of a spoon, and it sets as the cake cools rather than needing to dry.
A frosting recipe inside a yeast booklet looks like a stray page until you notice how many of the book’s doughs finish with the word iced. Brioche, buns, tea rings and coffee cakes all assume it, and a promotional cookbook that left a reader hunting elsewhere for the last step of its own recipes would have failed at the single thing it existed to do. So the advertisement quietly becomes a cookbook: it supplies the frosting, the sauce for the savarins, even the rules for toast. The list of variations is worth reading on its own account — lemon, almond, rose, chocolate — because it describes a cupboard in which rose water still stood beside the vanilla.