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Cream Maple Sugar Frosting
1 lb. soft maple sugar 1 cup cream Break sugar in small pieces, put in saucepan with cream, and stir occasionally until sugar is dissolved. Boil without stirring until a ball can be formed when mixture is tried in cold water. Beat until of right consistency to spread.
A two-ingredient boiled frosting that behaves like maple fudge. The whole recipe hinges on the cold-water test and on when you stop beating.
- Soft maple sugarThis is the cakes or blocks of cooled maple syrup sold at sugarhouses, not granulated maple sugar and not maple-flavoured sugar. If you cannot find it, 1 lb of hard maple sugar broken up will dissolve in the cream given a little patience over low heat.
- CreamOne cup of heavy cream. Nineteenth-century "cream" was not standardised, but a high-fat cream gives the smooth, non-grainy set this frosting depends on.
- The soft-ball stage"A ball can be formed" in cold water means the soft-ball stage, 234-240F on a thermometer. Below that the frosting stays a syrup; above it turns to hard candy on the cake.
- Do not stir while boilingThe instruction is not decoration. Stirring after the sugar has dissolved drags crystals up the pan walls and seeds the syrup, which is what makes a maple frosting turn grainy.
- When to stop beatingThe recipe says only to beat until it will spread. Standard fudge practice is to let the mixture cool before beating, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens. It sets fast at the end, so have the cake ready and stop while it will still flow off the spoon.
- If it hardens in the bowlSet the bowl over hot water and work in a spoonful of hot cream a little at a time until it spreads again.
- YieldRoughly enough to fill and frost a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake.
Maple sugar was a cheap sweetener across the northern United States and eastern Canada well into the nineteenth century, since it could be made at home from local trees while cane sugar had to be bought. Books of this era treat it as an everyday ingredient rather than a specialty, and "soft" maple sugar -- syrup boiled down and stirred to a spreadable cake -- was a common form sold in tubs. The method here is essentially fudge-making: dissolve, boil to soft ball, cool, beat. The same procedure with cane sugar and milk produces the penuche and fudge frostings found in American cookbooks of the period.