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Ornamental Frosting
2 tablespoons lemon juice confectioners' sugar flavoring To egg whites add three tablespoons sugar. Beat five minutes, add sugar in small quantities, beating five minutes between each addition. Continue thus until frosting is stiff enough to spread. Use pastry bag and tube to decorate cake with this frosting.
This is a classic royal icing, built by beating raw egg white with confectioners' sugar until it is stiff enough to hold a piped line. The icing is never cooked at any stage, either before or after it goes on the cake, and that is the problem with it now.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten cold and the finished frosting is spread on a cooled cake and left to air-dry. Nothing in the process brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and a decorated cake often sits at room temperature for a day or more while the icing hardens. Use a current royal icing recipe formulated for pasteurized whites or meringue powder instead.
- Quantities are not workable as givenThe ingredient line names lemon juice, confectioners' sugar and flavoring without amounts for the sugar, and the method calls for egg whites that the list does not count. There is no way to scale this reliably.
- What the sugar doesModern confectioners' sugar contains a starch anti-caking agent; whether the sugar sold under that name in this period did is less certain. The hard set comes chiefly from the egg white and sugar drying out. Older books sometimes specify sugar rolled and sifted at home, which behaves differently again.
- Why the long beatingThe five-minute intervals are not padding. Adding sugar slowly to an egg white foam and beating between additions is what produces an icing smooth enough to pass through a fine tube without breaking the line.
- Lemon juiceThe acid both flavors the icing and helps stabilize the whites. It is doing structural work, not just seasoning.
Ornamental frosting, called royal icing in British usage, was a standard finish for a decorated cake through the second half of the nineteenth century and after. Lowney's, published by a chocolate company, was one of many turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that showed home cooks how to get results resembling a confectioner's window: hard white borders, piped shells, lettering on a birthday or wedding cake. The icing's virtue was that it dried to a firm, matte shell that held its shape.