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Caramel Icing
2 cups sugar. 1 cup cream. 1/4 cup butter. 2 tablespoons sugar to caramel. Cook sugar and cream until it boils. Melt sugar into caramel sirup. Add the caramel sirup while both are hot. Keep trying a little in saucer and as soon as this begins to dry add butter; remove from fire and beat until cool enough to put between cake. If it should get stiff, add a little sweet cream and dissolve over hot water. This makes it smooth for top of cake.
A boiled caramel icing of the pre-thermometer era: sugar and cream cooked to the soft-ball stage, sharpened with a separately burnt caramel syrup. The section heading ("Vegetables") is a printing or indexing error in the original book.
- The hinge: cook to soft ballThe hinge: cook until it sets -- The "try a little in a saucer" test is watching for the point where a dropped spoonful stops spreading and begins to set, roughly what a modern cook would call the soft-ball stage, in the region of 238F on a thermometer. Under-cooked, the icing may never set; cooked much beyond that point it is liable to grain and stiffen before it can be spread.
- The caramel syrupThe 2 tablespoons of sugar are a separate item from the 2 cups. Melt them dry in a small heavy pan until deep amber and add to the hot sugar-and-cream mixture while both are still hot, as the recipe directs; caramel left to cool sets hard and will not blend in. Expect it to steam and splutter as it goes in.
- Cream"Cream" in a recipe of this date is not precisely specified; the method assumes a rich cream, and modern heavy or whipping cream is the safest reading. Milk or half-and-half will not give the body the recipe depends on.
- Beat off the heatAdd the butter at the end, pull the pan from the burner, and beat only as it cools. Beating a hot syrup drives crystallisation and gives a sandy texture; beating a warm one gives the opaque, spreadable fudge-like finish intended.
- Rescuing itThe instruction to loosen a stiffened icing with a little cream over hot water is sound and worth remembering. Warm it gently in a bowl set over simmering water and stir in cream a teaspoon at a time until it flows.
- Pan and scaleUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the ingredients; sugar and cream climb sharply when they boil. This makes roughly 2 cups of icing, enough to fill and cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake.
- TimingHave the cake cooled and ready before you start. This icing sets as it cools and does not wait; work quickly once it reaches spreading consistency.
Boiled icings of this kind belong to the decades when American home baking ran on a saucepan and a saucer of cold water rather than a thermometer, and the cook's judgment of when a syrup "begins to dry" was the whole skill. Caramel icing is often said to have been a fixture of Southern and Midwestern layer cakes, where the burnt-sugar note distinguished it from plain white boiled frosting; the two-part method here — a sugar-and-cream base plus a separately caramelised syrup — is generally held to give a deeper, less cloying flavour than simply browning all the sugar at once.