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Candies and Candy Making: Icing
Icing, as ordinarily made, consists of powdered sugar beaten up to a stiff froth with white of egg. Gum arabic is frequently used to give additional stiffness. The addition of butter or cream improves the flavor and prevents the icing from drying rapidly or cracking when cut, and various flavoring and coloring matters are added as desired. Icing may be of two sorts, either boiled or uncooked.
Unccoked Icing. - Beat up the whites of any required number of eggs to a stiff froth and whip into CANDIES AND CANDY MAKING them Confectioners' XXX sugar until the icing is of the desired consistency. Generally speaking, the white of 1 egg will make sufficient icing for a small cake or 2 eggs for a large one. And the white of 1 egg will require pound of sugar, more or less. Some prefer to add the sugar gradually, while the white of egg is being beaten. The addition of a little lemon juice, while beating, will improve the color and flavor.
The following recipe is recommended:
Beat up the whites of 2 eggs to a stiff froth, whip in pound of Confectioners' XXX or powdered sugar, tablespoonful of starch, ounce of pulverized gum arabic or less, and 1 teaspoonful of lemon juice. Mix the sugar, starch, and gum arabic together, and sift them into the white of egg. The longer the mixture is whipped or beaten the better the icing will be.
Boiled Icing. - For an ordinary cake, boil a cupful of sugar to the thread. Beat in the white of 1 egg, 1 tablespoonful of cream or 1 teaspoonful of butter. Now stir in, if convenient, 3 or 4 marshmallows and teaspoonful of cream of tartar.
Beat the whole until cold.
To Apply Icing. - To ice the top of a cake, but not the sides, dust the top with a little flour to kill the grease, which prevents the icing from running, brush, blow, or dust off the excess of flour and cut a band of white paper long enough to go around the cake and 1½ inches wide, grease the inside with butter, dust it with flour, and pin it around the cake so that the upper edge will be inch or more above the top. Pour on the frosting evenly, when if thin enough it will settle in a perfectly smooth and even surface. Let stand until it hardens, run a thin-bladed knife between the cake and the paper, and take off the paper.
Or, after dusting the cake with flour, spread the icing with a broad knife blade or thin wooden paddle dipped in iced water, and set it on the edge of an oven to harden, taking care that the oven is not hot enough to brown it.
Or a second coat of fresh icing may be added the following day or after the first layer is hardened. Any ornamentation must be added while the icing is wet, as otherwise it will not adhere.
To Ornament Icing. For this purpose prepare a special icing by beating slightly the white of 1 egg and stirring in gradually 2 cups of Confectioners' XXX sugar. Add the juice of a lemon and beat the whole until the mixture is stiff and elastic. Now make a paper cone of stiff white writing paper, pinning the side and clipping off the point, so that the icing can come through in a pencil or point of any desired thickness. Small tin cones are provided which may be used for this purpose, but the paper cone will answer. this with the icing or full, fold in the top and press on it with the thumbs to force the icing through the small end of the funnel.
Fill Ice the cake as above, let it stand for fifteen or twenty minutes until the icing is "tacky" but not hard, trace the design on the cake lightly with a lead pencil and follow it with the icing forced through the paper funnel. The icing may be flavored and tinted as desired.
Chocolate Icing.-A quick way to make chocolate icing for cake is to place a few good chocolate creams in a saucepan, add a tablespoonful or less of hot water or milk, and place it in a pan of hot water or over the steam of a teakettle until the chocolates are dissolved. Stir thoroughly and apply.
Or add to 1 pint of boiled icing prepared in the usual way 1 ounce of grated chocolates and the yolks of 2 eggs. Mix and apply.
Or beat up the white of an egg in a bowl, dissolve 1 pound of grated chocolate in 1 cup of milk in a double boiler, stir in a cupful of powdered sugar and 1 teaspoonful of vanilla.
Pour the mixture over the white of egg and beat to a stiff froth.
Coffee Icing-To 1 pint of icing prepared in the usual way add 2 ounces of strong black coffee, ounce of confectioners' sugar, and the yolks of 2 eggs.
A survey of turn-of-the-century cake icings, most of them built on raw egg. The terminology and the tools are worth understanding even though the formulas themselves are not usable as printed.
- Raw egg is the problemThe uncooked icing is nothing but raw whites and sugar, eaten as is. The ornamenting icing is the same. The coffee icing and the second of the three chocolate icings stir raw yolks into a mixture that is never heated again; the third pours hot chocolate and milk over a raw beaten white, which is no guarantee of a safe temperature. None of these reliably reaches a temperature that would control Salmonella, and icing sits at room temperature for hours or days on a cut cake.
- The boiled icing is not boiledOnly the sugar is cooked. A cupful of syrup at thread stage, beaten into a raw white and then beaten until cold, does not reliably carry enough heat to pasteurise the egg, and this version further dilutes it with cream or butter. It is not equivalent to a modern Italian meringue made with a measured hot syrup poured in a thin stream. Use a current recipe, or pasteurised whites or meringue powder.
- Confectioners' XXX sugarThe X designation referred to fineness of grind, with more X's meaning finer sugar; grades ran beyond XXX to XXXX and finer. Modern confectioners' or icing sugar is at least as fine and already contains cornstarch, so the separate spoonful of "starch" may be unnecessary, though here it may also have been intended to help the icing set.
- Gum arabicSold as powdered acacia gum, still available from baking and cake-decorating suppliers. It was used to make icing set hard and hold a piped line, the job now done by meringue powder or royal icing mixes.
- Thread stageSugar boiled "to the thread" is about 230-234F, the point at which a drop pulled between finger and thumb draws a fine filament. A thermometer replaces the finger test.
- Chocolate quantitiesThe third chocolate icing calls for a pound of grated chocolate to one cup of milk and a cup of sugar, which is far out of proportion to the rest of the page and reads as an error rather than a rich formula. The "chocolate creams" of the first method are ordinary fondant-centred chocolate candies.
- The paper collarThe flour-and-paper-band trick for pouring a flat top is sound and needs no updating: a strip of buttered, floured paper pinned around the cake and standing proud of the top acts as a dam while poured icing self-levels. A modern acetate strip or springform collar does the same.
- Cone versus bagThe pinned writing-paper cone is the ancestor of the parchment cornet still used for fine line work; baking parchment holds a point better than writing paper. "Tacky but not hard" is the correct moment to pipe onto a poured surface.
Icing in English cookery began as a genuinely iced surface: a sugar-and-egg-white paste spread on a baked cake and returned briefly to a cooling oven to set to a hard, glassy shell, which is exactly the "set it on the edge of an oven to harden" instruction preserved here. Through the nineteenth century the elaborately piped white cake, done in what confectioners called royal icing, became the standard for weddings and christenings, and gum arabic was one of several gums the trade used as a stiffener before commercial meringue powders existed. A book of household discoveries aimed at the ordinary kitchen rather than the professional confectioner reproduces the trade methods in miniature: the paper cornet instead of the tin syringe, chocolate creams melted down instead of couverture, and a paper collar in place of a turntable and palette knife. It also reflects a period in which raw egg white was treated as an entirely everyday ingredient, an assumption no modern kitchen shares.