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Brown Sugar Icing
4 tablespoons sweet cream. 2 cups light brown sugar. 1/4 cup butter. Mix as above, adding cream a little at a time.
A fudge-style icing of the penuche family, written in the shorthand of a book where the preceding entry carried the method. The instructions here are only the variation; the technique has to be reconstructed.
- "Mix as above" means a cooked icing"Mix as above" points back to a preceding recipe not reproduced here, so the method cannot be recovered from this entry alone. Icings of this type are generally cooked -- sugar, butter and liquid boiled together, then cooled and beaten -- but that is inference rather than anything the book states. Adding the cream a little at a time was presumably meant to help the sugar dissolve smoothly.
- The temperature that mattersSoft ball is conventionally given as 235-240F on a candy thermometer, and boiling much past that tends toward a hard, grainy set while stopping short leaves the icing too loose. Note that the recipe itself specifies neither a temperature nor a stage.
- Cool before beatingLet the syrup drop to about 110F, undisturbed, before you start beating. Stirring hot syrup grows large sugar crystals and gives a gritty finish.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream common in period kitchens. Heavy cream is the closest match; four tablespoons is a quarter cup.
- Light brown sugarBrown sugar of the period was not necessarily made the way most modern brown sugar is -- refined white with molasses added back -- though how much it differed varied by producer. Modern light brown packed into the cup is a reasonable substitute; dark brown makes the icing noticeably heavier and more molasses-forward.
- ButterA quarter cup is half a stick, 4 tablespoons. Use unsalted and add a pinch of salt if the icing tastes flat.
- Working timeOnce it thickens it sets fast. Have the cake on the rack and the spatula in hand; if it stiffens too far, a teaspoon of hot cream beaten in will loosen it.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; two cups of sugar boiled down with butter and cream will make roughly enough for a two-layer cake, depending on how thickly it is spread.
Brown sugar boiled with cream and butter to the soft-ball stage is the same operation that produces penuche, the American fudge, and this icing is close kin to it -- penuche caught before it sets. Cooked brown-sugar icings were economical: brown sugar was cheap, and a boiled icing stretched a small amount of butter and cream over a whole cake. The compressed cross-referencing here, where a recipe consists only of its differences from the one above it, is common in books of this kind, which is why the entry reads as a fragment.