Home › Icings & Fillings › Caramel Filling
Caramel Filling
3 cups sugar. 1 1/2 cups milk. 1/2 cup caramel syrup. 1 tablespoon butter. Put milk and three cups sugar on fire. Watch carefully. Caramel the one-half cup sugar in iron or steel spider and when it boils up pour into milk and sugar while boiling; when both are the same heat the caramel sugar will not crystalize. Cook until forms soft ball in cold water. Put in butter; take from fire. When cools a little, beat into a creamy state and put on cake. Should it get too stiff, add a little cream.
A boiled caramel frosting of the fudge family: sugar and milk cooked to the soft-ball stage, enriched with dark caramel, then beaten until it turns opaque and spreadable. Everything depends on temperature control at two moments.
- The hinge: match the temperaturesThe instruction to pour the molten caramel into the boiling milk-and-sugar "when both are the same heat" is the whole trick. Cold or cool caramel hitting hot syrup, or the reverse, seeds crystals and the finished filling turns grainy. Have the milk mixture at a full boil before the caramel goes in, and pour it in a thin steady stream.
- Soft ball is 238FSoft ball is roughly 235-240F -- Rather than testing in cold water, a candy thermometer pulled at about 238F (114C) lands in the soft-ball range. Cook further and the filling sets stiffer; stop short and it will be loose on the cake.
- SpiderAn old cast-iron skillet, originally one with legs for hearth cooking. Any heavy skillet or small heavy saucepan works for dry-caramelising the half cup of sugar; thin pans scorch it before it melts evenly.
- The ingredient list contradicts the methodThe list calls for 1/2 cup caramel syrup, the method for 1/2 cup sugar caramelised in the pan. Follow the method: dry-caramelise 1/2 cup granulated sugar until it is deep amber and bubbling, and treat the list entry as shorthand for what that sugar becomes.
- Beat at the right momentLet the mixture cool undisturbed to about 110F, then beat. Beating while it is still hot produces coarse crystals; letting it go stone cold makes it seize in the pan before it reaches the cake.
- RescueThe note about adding cream is sound and worth having ready. Warm cream, a tablespoon at a time, will loosen a filling that stiffens mid-spread; the mixture stiffens fast once it starts to set.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly three cups, enough for a two-layer cake.
Mrs. Wilson's New Cook Book (1920) came out of Mary A. Wilson's work as a food writer for the Philadelphia press during and just after the First World War. Boiled sugar frostings of this kind were common in American home baking of the period, before butter-and-confectioners'-sugar icings became the norm. A cooked filling like this one spreads over a plain butter cake and uses very little butter. The two-stage caramel method here, dry sugar browned separately and married to a boiling milk syrup, is close in principle to old-style caramel fudge; the browning develops flavour that plain boiled sugar cannot reach.