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Maple Fondant Frosting
1 cup maple sugar 1/2 cup thin cream Boil together for 15 minutes; remove from fire and stir constantly until it stiffens. Spread quickly on warm cake as it hardens very fast.
This is a true fondant frosting: a sugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, then beaten until it crystallizes into an opaque, fudge-like coat. The hinge is timing at the end, not the beginning.
- Work fast at the finishMaple fondant sets the moment it turns from glossy to matte and begins to thicken under the spoon. Have the cake out, warm, and within arm's reach before you take the pan off the heat, and pour rather than dab.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" in books of this period means what is now sold as light or coffee cream, around 18 to 20 percent fat. Half-and-half is the closest common substitute; heavy cream will make a stiffer, more caramel-like frosting.
- Maple sugarGranulated or grated hard maple sugar, sold in blocks and cakes at the time. One cup packed weighs roughly 6 to 7 oz. Maple syrup is not a substitute here without recalculating the liquid, since the recipe depends on the sugar-to-cream ratio.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockFifteen minutes assumes a particular pan and a particular flame. The recipe gives no temperature, but a frosting of this type is generally taken to about the soft-ball stage, 236-240F on a candy thermometer; much below that it may not stiffen, and much above it turns hard and short.
- Do not stir while it boilsStirring -- The recipe mentions stirring only after the pan comes off the fire; it says nothing about the boil itself. Agitating a hot syrup encourages large crystals and a gritty frosting, and the beating here is done off the heat as the mixture cools.
- If it seizes in the panOverbeaten fondant stiffens before it reaches the cake. A teaspoon or two of cream stirred in over very low heat will loosen it enough to spread, at some cost to the gloss.
- YieldAbout a cup of frosting, enough to cover the top of one 8- or 9-inch layer or fill and top a small two-layer cake. Double it to frost sides as well.
Maple sugar was the cheap sweetener of the northern United States and eastern Canada long before cane sugar became universally affordable, and cookbooks from those regions kept using it well after the economics reversed, by which point it had become a luxury flavoring rather than a thrift measure. Boiled fondant frostings like this one belong to the era before butter-and-confectioners'-sugar buttercream took over American home baking: the cook made candy and poured it over the cake, which is why the instructions read like a fudge recipe and why speed matters so much.