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Ice Cream Frosting
1 1/2 cups sugar 1/2 cup water Whites 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Follow directions for White Mountain Cream.
This is a boiled icing: a hot sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg whites, which is what the cross-referenced White Mountain Cream describes. The whole thing hinges on the syrup, so cook it by thermometer rather than by eye.
- Syrup temperatureBoil the sugar and water without stirring. The original directs the syrup by eye (the thread test); if you prefer a thermometer, the soft-ball range of roughly 238-240F answers. Undercooked syrup leaves the frosting sticky and slow to set; overcooked syrup tends to grain and to set before you can spread it.
- Adding the syrupBeat the whites to stiff but not dry peaks first, then pour the syrup in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl while beating. Dumping it in cooks the whites into threads.
- Beat until coolKeep beating five to eight minutes with a stand mixer, until the bowl is only warm and the icing holds a peak that just curls at the tip.
- Vanilla lastAdd the half teaspoon of vanilla once the mixture has cooled somewhat; alcohol-based extract added to boiling-hot meringue loses much of its aroma.
- Egg whites and heatThe syrup warms the whites but does not reliably bring them to a pasteurizing temperature throughout. If the frosting is for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites or powdered egg white.
- Weather mattersBoiled icings are humidity-sensitive. On a damp day the syrup will pick up moisture from the air and the frosting may weep or refuse to firm; cook to the high end of the range.
- YieldEnough to fill and cover a two-layer cake. Spread it while soft, as it crusts over fairly quickly.
- The nameThere is no cream in this frosting; the ingredients are sugar, water, egg whites and vanilla.
Boiled or "cooked" frostings were common in American cake-baking from roughly the 1870s until the mid-twentieth century, when butter-and-confectioners'-sugar icings largely displaced them. They required nothing more than granulated sugar, water and eggs, and gave a brilliant white finish. The technique is the same one Italian meringue is built on, and the family of names is confusing: White Mountain cream, marshmallow frosting and this "ice cream frosting" are variations on hot syrup beaten into egg whites, distinguished mainly by sugar-to-white ratio and flavoring. (Seven-minute frosting is a related but distinct method, the whites and sugar being beaten together over hot water rather than a cooked syrup poured in.) Cookbooks of this period routinely wrote one master method out in full and then referred related recipes back to it, as this entry does.