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Chocolate Icings
To any of the three foregoing recipes unsweetened chocolate may be added by cutting it fine, melting and stirring into the icing. The quantity is governed by one's fondness for chocolate.
NOTE: All measurements are made level. A cupful means a level cupful. A spoonful means a level spoonful. (See page 10.) Flour is sifted once before being measured.
A variation rather than a standalone recipe: it converts any plain white icing into a chocolate one. The proportions are left to the cook, so the useful information is in the handling.
- How much chocolateThe recipe leaves the amount entirely to the cook. As a starting point for an icing covering one 8- or 9-inch layer cake, an ounce or two of unsweetened chocolate is a reasonable trial quantity; since unsweetened chocolate brings no sugar of its own, larger amounts will tend towards bitterness and a stiffer icing unless sugar is added with it.
- Unsweetened chocolate todayThe period ingredient is what we now sell as unsweetened or baking chocolate, 100 percent cacao in bars or wrapped 1 oz squares. It is not cocoa powder and not bittersweet; substituting either changes both the fat and the sugar balance.
- Melt gentlyChopping fine, as directed, matters because unsweetened chocolate scorches easily. Melt over hot, not boiling, water or in short bursts in a microwave, and stop while a few lumps remain and stir them out.
- Temperature is the hingeAdd the melted chocolate warm and fluid, not hot, and stir it in quickly. Cold chocolate meeting cold icing seizes into grains; hot chocolate slackens a boiled icing so it will not hold a peak.
- ConsistencyChocolate stiffens icing as it cools. If the mixture tightens beyond spreading, thin with a teaspoon of cream or hot water at a time rather than reheating.
- The measurement noteThe appended note restates a general convention of the book rather than anything peculiar to this variation, and points the reader back to page 10. A cupful and a spoonful mean level, and flour is sifted before it goes into the cup, which typically yields around 4 oz per cup rather than the roughly 5 oz a scooped, unsifted cup gives.
Unsweetened chocolate was the default form of chocolate in an American kitchen well into the twentieth century: sold in wrapped one-ounce squares, meant to be grated or chopped and cooked, and expected to be sweetened by whatever it was put into. Here a chocolate icing appears as an afterthought to three white ones rather than as its own recipe, and the quantity is left entirely to taste. The note on level measurement is a period marker of its own. Home cooking in the United States was in the middle of a shift from the heaped spoonful and the handful to standardized cups and spoons, a change generally traced to the Boston Cooking School and its followers, and cookbook authors of the 1900s and 1910s repeated the rule at the foot of a page.