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Chocolate Nut Icing
1/3 cup cream or milk 1 cup sugar 1 1/2 tablespoons health cocoa 2 tablespoons chopped nuts 1/2 teaspoon vanilla A few grains salt Cook all except vanilla till thick. Beat till cool enough to spread on the cake. Beat in the vanilla.
This is a fudge icing in miniature: a sugar-and-milk syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, then beaten until it loses its gloss and sets. The whole outcome turns on how far you cook it.
- Cook to a temperature, not a look"Till thick" in a boiled icing of this kind is usually taken to mean the soft-ball stage, about 234-240F on a candy thermometer; the time will vary with your pan and heat. Under-cooked it will never set; carried much beyond soft ball it stiffens before it reaches the cake.
- Health cocoaProbably plain unsweetened cocoa of the sort sold by health food houses without added sugar or flavourings; the exact sense of the term is not certain. Use 1 1/2 tablespoons natural or Dutch-process unsweetened cocoa; do not substitute drinking chocolate or sweetened mix, which would throw the sugar badly out of balance.
- Hold back the nutsThe recipe boils them with the syrup, but boiled nuts soften. If you prefer them crisp, stir the 2 tablespoons of chopped nuts in during the final beating instead, along with the vanilla.
- Why the vanilla goes in lastVanilla is volatile and boils off. Adding it once the mixture has cooled to lukewarm keeps the flavour, and the same is true of the cooling before beating: beat it hot and it will set coarse.
- Don't stir while it boilsGo easy on the stirring -- Once the sugar has dissolved, stir only as much as is needed to keep a milk mixture from catching, and wash any crystals down the sides with a wet brush. Agitating a boiling syrup encourages the coarse crystals that make an icing gritty.
- Spread fastBoiled icings firm up within a minute or two of reaching spreading consistency. Have the cake ready and level, and if it stiffens too soon beat in a teaspoon of hot milk.
- YieldRoughly three-quarters of a cup, enough to cover the top of a single 8- or 9-inch layer.
Boiled icings of this kind - sugar, milk and cocoa cooked to soft ball and beaten smooth - were a common American cake finish, and are essentially a thin fudge spread while still workable. The phrase "health cocoa" suggests the vegetarian and health-reform cookbook tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where ingredients were often specified as unadulterated versions of common groceries, sold plain and unblended by health food houses. The cake and dessert chapters of such books show how far the reform diet accommodated ordinary sweets even while it argued against tea, coffee and flesh foods.