Almond Icing
A delicious icing for either one of the white cakes is made by using either the boiled or the uncooked icing-recipe, and adding to it one-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Almond Flavoring Extract and one-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Orange Flavoring Extract.
This is a flavoring variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's boiled or uncooked icing in front of you. What matters is which base you choose and when the extracts go in.
- The two bases"Boiled icing" of this period means a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, usually given as about 235-240F, beaten into stiff egg whites -- close to what we would call an Italian meringue. The recipe itself specifies no temperature. "Uncooked icing" is confectioners' sugar beaten with egg white or a little liquid, closer to a modern royal or water icing.
- Add the extracts lastBoth almond and orange flavor are volatile and will cook off in hot syrup. Beat them in at the very end, once a boiled icing has cooled to lukewarm and is nearly set, or after an uncooked icing has reached spreading consistency.
- Modern extract strengthAlmond extract sold today is generally a solution of benzaldehyde, natural or synthetic, and is potent. A quarter teaspoon in a batch of icing is restrained; taste before adding more, since almond overwhelms quickly.
- Orange extract vs. zestOrange extract is alcohol-based and gives a clean perfume. Finely grated zest is not a direct swap -- it adds oil and specks that will thin and mottle a white icing.
- The Larkin brandLarkin Almond and Larkin Orange Flavoring Extracts were the publisher's own mail-order products and have long been off the market. Any standard almond and orange extract stands in one for one.
- QuantityThe original gives no yield because it belongs to whichever base recipe you use. A quarter teaspoon of each extract is presumably sized to a single batch of the book's own boiled or uncooked icing; scale with the base.
- If you use the uncooked baseAn uncooked icing built on raw egg white is never heated. Use pasteurized whites or meringue powder if the cake is for children, the elderly, or anyone pregnant.
Bottled flavoring extracts were one of the great household conveniences of the late nineteenth century, and books like this one exist partly to sell them. The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, built an enormous mail-order business on soap and household goods sold with premiums -- most famously through its "Larkin Clubs of Ten," in which a secretary gathered orders from a group of customers and the club earned a premium; cookbooks carrying Larkin brand names throughout the ingredient lists were a natural extension of that trade. The pairing itself is older than the bottles: bitter almond oil for almond flavor, and orange-flower water for orange, had been used in white icings and marzipan work in English and American confectionery long before an extract could be poured from a bottle in a quarter-teaspoon measure.