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Transparent Icing (II)
Ingredients.
Three-quarters of a pound of sifted Icing Sugar.
Three tablespoonfuls of boiling Water.
Put into the stewpan; stir, but do not let it boil, and when of the proper consistency pour it over the pastry.
This is a water or glacé icing, the simplest of the poured glazes, and it stands or falls on temperature. Keep it warm enough to flow and cool enough never to bubble.
- The hinge: no boilingHeat the sugar and water only until the mixture is smooth and warm to the finger. If it simmers, the sugar is more likely to recrystallise as it cools, and the glaze turns dull and gritty instead of clear.
- Icing sugarIcing sugar is confectioners' or powdered sugar. Three-quarters of a pound is roughly 3 cups, spooned and levelled; weigh it if you can, as powdered sugar packs badly.
- Why yours may not be transparentMost modern confectioners' sugar carries about 3 per cent cornstarch as an anti-caking agent, which clouds the finished glaze. Pure milled icing sugar, sold for glazing work, gives the clear finish the title promises.
- StewpanA stewpan here is a straight-sided saucepan. A small heavy pan over the lowest heat, or a bowl set over hot water off the heat, gives better control than direct flame.
- ConsistencyThe proper consistency is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and leave a trail that closes slowly. Three tablespoons of water is a starting point; add water half a teaspoon at a time, since a few drops move it a long way.
- Flavour and glossA teaspoon of lemon juice sharpens the flavour and helps keep the glaze clear; a teaspoon of liquid glucose or corn syrup adds shine and slows crystallising. Neither is in the original, and corn syrup in particular is a later product than this recipe.
- Applying itPour over pastry that is cool but not cold, in one movement, and let it find its own level rather than spreading it with a knife. It skins over fairly quickly and sets firm as it dries.
- YieldRoughly enough to glaze an 8-inch cake, a tart of similar size, or a dozen or more small pastries, depending on how thickly it is poured.
This belongs to the family of water icings that Victorian cookery manuals distinguished carefully from royal icing, which is beaten with egg white and dries opaque and hard. "Transparent" is doing real work in the title: the point of a glace icing is that the surface of the pastry shows faintly through a glassy film, a finish borrowed from French patisserie and much used on Genoese slices, eclairs and glazed tartlets. That a recipe this brief could be written at all is often attributed to the industrial refining of the nineteenth century, which is said to have put finely milled, blazingly white icing sugar in reach of any cook; earlier confectioners had to pound and sieve loaf sugar themselves, and the grade of the powder is generally held to have determined whether the glaze came out clear or chalky.