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Icing and Ornamenting Cakes
As these matters have been mentioned incidentally in other parts of the book we will recapitulate by observing that there are three well-known ways of ornamenting cakes; first, by patterns in piping of white icing on the cake itself not iced, as on the fine yellow, glazed surface of a savoy cake, or a dark chocolate cake, or a charlotte-russe; second, by covering the cakes with different colored glaze or boiled icing as described in connection with white cakes, and third, by frosting with the raw icing as made for meringue puffs and "kisses," and ornamenting with the same.
The first requisite is to make the cake itself sym metrical and level by trimming. The cakes of a skillful cake maker will rise in baking all round alike so that only a mere shaving will have to be taken off, but whether little or much must be cut it is obviously useless to try to make an object that is not "square with the world" look well by merely covering its deformity with a coat of icing.
Fruit cakes always require two coats of icing, and all cakes that are to be handsomely ornamented should have the same double covering. Make the icing as directed under the head of meringue puffs and macaroons, with a pound of powdered sugar to 6 whites of eggs. Spread it all over the cakes with a palette knife, smooth over rough places, fill up hollows, cover the hole left by the cake mold in the center with a patch of writing paper and ice over that, and leave the cakes an hour or two to dry. For the second coat use powdered sugar sifted through a fine seive or Swiss muslin; beat up a pound with 4 whites and then add 4 more whites one at a time, beating after each addition till the icing is firm again, except the last white which makes the glossy surface on the cake and should only be beaten in a little. Drop in the few drops of acetic acid sometime near the end of the beating and carefully add a drop or two of liquid bluing or dissolved indigo, to whiten the icing, and some flavoring extract. To get a fine surface on the cakes as smooth and free from marks as fine card board the icing must be first as firm by beating as it can be made and thinned with the last white of egg, and another if necessary till it will settle slowly to smoothness on the cakes, but will not actually drip off. Besides that the cakes must be made smoother by dexterously drawing over them the edge of a band of paper.
Cut a sheet of foolscap into ribbons 2 inches wide. Spread the prepared icing thickly on the the top of the cake, take the paper strip by the two ends and scrape off the surplus icing with the paper edge at one even stroke, drawing towards you. Persons in practice can so well manage a ribbon of paper held stretched between the fingers and thumbs of both hands that way that they can smooth over a cushion or any concave or convex shape covered with icing without leaving the mark of either beginning or ending. When the sides of the cakes have likewise been covered and smoothed set the cakes in a drying place.
The ornamental piping on cakes is done by pressing stiff icing or meringue paste out of the cut point of a paper cornet. Roll up half a sheet of note paper into funnel shape and pin it, nearly fill with the icing, and double over the paper so as to shut it in. If you cut off the point of the cornet straight the piping pressed out will be a plain round cord. If a slanting side snip is taking off the icing comes out like narrow tape. Cut the point of the paper like saw teeth and a three or four sided cord is formed, and there are many variations. We name the paper cornet for example, but for constant use there are made tubes or points of the thinnest brass plate filed into the required shapes at the points, and these are dropped into paper cornets made large enough to receive them.
The brass point that is filed into three saw teeth will from a border of leaves around a cake. The tooth that is uppermost is caused by a motion of the hand to make the indentation marks as the icing passes under and out, and a sudden breaking off draws out the leaf to a point. This will probably sufficiently explain the matter of cake ornamentation for those who have never seen it done, the rest must come through actual practice and example.
This is a working confectioner's account of royal icing and piping as practiced in the late nineteenth century, and much of the craft advice still holds. Two of its ingredients, however, put it outside what can be made in a kitchen today.
- Raw egg white, dried not cookedBoth coats are beaten raw whites and sugar, spread on the cake and left to air-dry for an hour or two before being eaten. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the sugar concentration in icing is not high enough to be reliably self-preserving. A current royal icing recipe should be used instead.
- Liquid bluing and indigoThe "drop or two of liquid bluing" is laundry bluing, historically an iron ferrocyanide or ultramarine suspension, and dissolved indigo is a textile dye. Neither is a food colouring, and both were added here purely to cancel the yellow cast of the whites.
- Acetic acidThe few drops are working as an acidulant to help the whites take and hold air, the same job cream of tartar or lemon juice does. Household vinegar is dilute acetic acid; the glacial or concentrated grades a nineteenth-century bakeshop might have kept on hand are corrosive and are not kitchen materials.
- The cakes namedA savoy cake is a stiff-beaten sponge baked in a fluted mould, prized for the smooth glazed crust the author wants to pipe on directly. Charlotte russe here means the moulded ladyfinger-and-cream dessert, not a cake layer.
- Foolscap and note paperFoolscap is a sheet roughly 13 by 8 inches, cut here into two-inch ribbons and used as a straightedge to shear icing flat. Any stiff, uncoated paper or a long offset spatula does the same work; the point is one unbroken stroke, since a stop and restart leaves a visible mark.
- The paper cornetRolling a half sheet of note paper into a cone and pinning it is the ancestor of the parchment cornet still used for fine line work. The "tubes or points of the thinnest brass plate" are early piping tips, dropped into the paper cone exactly as modern tips sit in a bag.
- The hinge of the whole methodThe consistency instruction is the real content: beat the icing as stiff as it will go, then let it back down with whites one at a time until it "will settle slowly to smoothness" but will not run off the edge.
Ornamental piping of this kind belonged largely to the confectioner rather than the home cook, and instruction of this sort was aimed at bakeshop and hotel pastry work as much as at the domestic kitchen. The frank instruction to trim the cake level before icing it, and the remark that no coat of sugar will rescue an object not "square with the world," is trade talk: the icing was understood as a plaster finish over sound carpentry. Whitening agents were a standard part of that finish, since egg whites and cane sugar of the period both carried a yellow tint, and a faint blue was added to trick the eye into reading the surface as pure white — the same optical reasoning behind bluing added to laundry. Metal piping tips of thin filed brass were available commercially by the later nineteenth century, and the author's careful description of them as an alternative to the paper cornet suggests his readers could not all be assumed to own a set.