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Chocolate Icing
Ingredients, Half a gill of Water.
Three ounces of Chocolate.
Half a pound of Icing Sugar.
One teaspoonful of Essence of Vanilla.
Melt the chocolate in water and boil it well, being very careful that it does not burn; allow it to cool down a little, then add the vanilla and the icing sugar. Do not let the icing boil once the sugar is added.
A plain chocolate glaze of the water-and-icing-sugar type, closer to a modern glacé icing than to a buttercream or ganache. The whole recipe hinges on the final line.
- Never boil after the sugar goes inOnce the icing sugar is dissolved, heat drives crystallisation and the glaze sets grainy and dull instead of glossy. Warm it gently to loosen if it stiffens, but keep it well below a simmer.
- Half a gillA British imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is 2.5 fl oz, about 5 tablespoons. Start with 2 to 3 tablespoons and add more only if the icing is too thick to pour.
- The chocolate"Chocolate" in a book of this date means a hard block of plain eating or cooking chocolate, lightly sweetened and fairly coarse. A bittersweet bar of 60-70 percent is the closest match; chocolate chips contain stabilisers that fight a smooth glaze.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Sift it before adding, since the lumps in an unsifted box will not dissolve in this small amount of liquid at low heat.
- Melting without burningCombine the chocolate and water in a small saucepan set over a pan of barely simmering water, or use very low direct heat and stir constantly. Chocolate scorches easily and the burnt taste cannot be masked.
- Essence of vanillaModern vanilla extract, used measure for measure. Add it off the heat as directed, since the aroma volatilises quickly in a hot pan.
- Consistency and useThe icing should coat the back of a spoon and fall in a ribbon. Pour it over the cake while just warm and spread with a palette knife dipped in hot water; it should set in roughly an hour, depending on how thick it has been poured.
- YieldHalf a pound of sugar plus the chocolate gives roughly 1 to 1.25 cups of icing, enough to glaze the top and sides of a single 7 to 8 inch cake or about two dozen small cakes.
Poured chocolate glazes of this kind belong to the late Victorian and Edwardian pastry repertoire, when eating chocolate had become cheap and reliable enough for domestic cooks to treat it as a store-cupboard ingredient rather than a luxury drink. The instruction to boil the chocolate with water first is a survival from the older practice of grating hard block chocolate and cooking it down into a smooth paste, a step generally said to have been necessary before conching produced the finer-textured bars of later years. Vanilla essence appears here as a matter of course, which itself suggests a period in which commercially bottled essences had become familiar to British households, and cookery books adopted them readily. The recipe reads as a finishing recipe rather than a dish, the sort of thing a cook was expected to have by heart and reach for whenever a plain sponge or a tray of small cakes needed dressing up for the table.