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Brown Sugar Icing and Filling
3 cups brown sugar 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter vanilla extract Cook sugar, milk and butter together until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water; add vanilla. Then beat until a little thick. If desired, add nuts. Pour on cake and spread.
Butterscotch Icing and Filling (Without Sugar) 2 cups light syrup 1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup milk Boil syrup, butter and milk together until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water. Cool slightly without stirring and pour while warm on cake. Chopped nuts may be added while icing is still soft.
Two boiled icings of the fudge family, both worked by candy stages rather than by clock time. A thermometer removes nearly all the guesswork.
- Soft ball, in numbersThe soft-ball stage is 235-240F on a candy thermometer. Test in cold water as a check if you like, but the thermometer is faster and more reliable, and a few degrees over will give you a crumbly icing that sets before it reaches the cake.
- The hinge: when to beatCool the brown sugar mixture undisturbed to about 110F before beating. Beating while it is hot throws large sugar crystals and the icing turns grainy. Stop beating the moment it loses its gloss and thickens slightly, then spread at once, because it firms fast.
- "Light syrup"Most likely light corn syrup rather than a thin sugar syrup. Golden syrup can be substituted and gives a rounder flavour.
- "Without sugar"The claim refers to granulated sugar only. Corn syrup is sugar in solution, so this is not a reduced-sugar recipe in any modern sense.
- Brown sugarLight brown sugar gives the standard penuche flavour; dark brown makes a noticeably molasses-heavy icing. Pack it when measuring.
- Vanilla and nutsNo quantity is given for vanilla; a teaspoon suits three cups of sugar. The recipe adds it after boiling, off the heat. Around a cup of chopped walnuts or pecans is a reasonable amount.
- Pan and boil-overUse a heavy saucepan at least three times the volume of the ingredients. Milk and sugar climb sharply as they approach soft ball, and a scorched bottom will flavour the whole batch.
- YieldThree cups of brown sugar makes enough to fill and cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake generously. The butterscotch version makes a broadly comparable amount.
Boiled icings of this kind sit halfway between frosting and candy: the brown sugar version is essentially penuche, cooked to soft ball and beaten until it clouds, a technique lifted straight from nineteenth-century fudge making. Company cookbooks like this one were promotional literature, meant to keep home bakers making cakes from scratch, and they collected the icings that went on top as a matter of course. The second recipe's parenthetical boast, "Without Sugar," is the more revealing line on the page: corn syrup and molasses were commonly used in place of granulated sugar, and such substitutions are often said to reflect the sugar economies of the First World War era, when American households were urged to economise on it — though the page itself does not say so — and the habit of advertising a substitution as a virtue outlasted the shortage itself.