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Coconut Frosting
2 cups sugar 1/2 cup water 1 teaspoon butter 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract 1/2 cup shredded or grated coconut Boil sugar and water to the soft-ball stage (238 degrees F.), then add butter and cook until thick enough to spread. Add flavoring. When cool spread on cake and sprinkle coconut over the top.
A plain boiled sugar frosting, essentially a quick fondant, with coconut scattered over the surface rather than beaten in. The whole thing hinges on the thermometer reading and on when you stop stirring.
- The soft-ball number is the recipe238F is the only real instruction here; a few degrees low gives a frosting that never sets, a few degrees high gives one that hardens in the bowl before it reaches the cake. Use a digital thermometer and pull the pan the moment it reads.
- "Cook until thick enough to spread"The wording reads as continued cooking, but on a syrup already at soft ball the thickening most likely comes from cooling and working the mixture: after the butter goes in, let it cool somewhat, then stir or beat until it loses its gloss and thickens to a spreadable cream. Spread quickly once it does.
- Do not stir the boiling syrupOnce the sugar has dissolved, leave it alone and wash any crystals down the pan sides with a wet brush. Stirring a hot sugar syrup seeds crystallization and you get a grainy frosting.
- Coconut then and now"shredded or grated" at this period meant unsweetened dried coconut or fresh grated from the shell. Modern sweetened flake will make the topping noticeably sweeter; unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut is closer to what was intended.
- ToastingThe original scatters the coconut raw. A few minutes in a 350F oven, spread on a sheet and stirred once or twice, gives far more flavor and can be done while the syrup cooks.
- Butter quantityOne teaspoon in two cups of sugar is there for gloss and to soften the set, not for richness. It is not a misprint and there is no point increasing it much without changing the texture.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar should make enough to cover the top, and probably the sides, of a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake, or the top of a sheet.
- HumidityBoiled sugar frostings behave badly on a wet day. On a humid afternoon expect a softer set and a surface that stays slightly sticky.
Boiled sugar frostings of this kind were the standard American cake finish before the rise of confectioners' sugar buttercreams, and cookbooks of the 1920s and 30s carry whole pages of them, distinguished mainly by the temperature the syrup reaches and whether egg white is beaten in. Coconut arrived in American home kitchens in quantity in the late nineteenth century, first as whole nuts from the Caribbean trade and then as packaged desiccated shred, which is what made a topping like this a matter of opening a box rather than cracking and grating a coconut. New Delineator Recipes came out of the test kitchens of The Delineator, a women's magazine, and the specified 238F is characteristic of the period's push toward candy thermometers and measured accuracy in place of the older "boil to a thread" and cold-water tests.