Home › Recipes › Rose Glaze or Boiled Icing
Rose Glaze or Boiled Icing
Make the white glaze and color and flavor to suit, just as it begins to be so thick as to be hard to beat.
This is a variation rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you have the book's white glaze (a boiled sugar icing) already going on the stove or in the bowl. Everything hinges on when the color and flavor go in.
- The hinge: add flavor lateRosewater and coloring go in as the icing thickens to the point where beating starts to become hard work, which is the one thing the line specifies. The usual reasoning is that heat drives off the volatile rose aroma and that extra liquid thins a syrup you have just spent effort thickening.
- What "white glaze" means hereThe book's white glaze is not given on this page, so its method has to be taken on trust. A boiled icing of this period is generally a sugar syrup cooked to about the soft-ball stage and then beaten until opaque; some versions beat the hot syrup into whipped egg whites, others beat the syrup alone, sometimes with a little acid or cream of tartar.
- Rosewater, not rose extract"Flavor to suit" for a rose glaze means food-grade rosewater or a rose essence. Start with half a teaspoon per cup of icing and taste as you go; rose slides from floral to soapy quickly, and cosmetic-grade rose products are not for eating.
- The coloringPeriod pink came from cochineal or carmine, sold as a liquid tincture. A drop or two of modern gel or paste color does the same job with less added liquid, which matters at this stage of the beating.
- Working timeBoiled icing sets hard and fast. Have the cake or pastries ready before the icing reaches the thick stage, and spread immediately; reheating over hot water buys only a little time before the sugar begins to grain.
- If your version uses egg whitesHot syrup at soft-ball temperature heats the whites but does not reliably bring the whole mass to a pasteurizing temperature. Use pasteurized whites if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- HumidityBoiled icings weep and refuse to set on a damp day. This is not a fault in the recipe; cook the syrup a couple of degrees higher when the kitchen is humid.
Nineteenth-century American bakers are often said to have run one base formula and spun variations off it, which is what this entry appears to be: a single line telling the pastry cook to take the white boiled glaze already in the book and turn it pink and floral. Rose was one of a small standard set of confectioners' flavors alongside lemon, vanilla, almond and orange-flower, all of them available as bottled essences from grocers and druggists, and rosewater had been a staple of English and American cake-making since well before sugar icing was common. The pairing of a pink tint with rose flavor seems to have been a loose convention rather than a rule, plausibly giving the buyer a visual cue to what was inside, as green is said to have done for pistachio and yellow for lemon. The book is aimed at working hotel and bakery cooks, which explains the telegraphic style: a professional reading it already knew how the white glaze went, and needed only to be told when to add the bottle.