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Yellow Glaze or Boiled Icing
1 pound of granulated sugar. 1/2 teacupful of water. 6 yolks of eggs. Flavoring extracts.
Boil the sugar and water, without stirring, for 5 minutes or more, or till a drop of the syrup in cold water sets so that it can hardly be flattened between the finger and thumb. A deep bowl-shaped saucepan holding one quart should be used. Have the yolks slightly beaten ready in a bowl. Pour the bubbling syrup to the yolks quickly while you rapidly beat them with an egg beater. Return to the fire and keep stirring while it cooks a minute or two. It will then do to pour on sheets of cake and if the syrup was at the right point it will set hard and dry as soon as cold.
But it is better to finish by beating the glaze rapidly while it is cooling, and add the flavoring just as it becomes too thick to beat. The above is the easiest of the kind to make, as it does not make so much difference what point the syrup is boiled to--it will dry on the cakes anyway.
This is a pâte à bombe by another name: hot sugar syrup whipped into egg yolks, then briefly cooked and beaten smooth. It behaves well, but the syrup stage and the pouring window are what decide the result.
- The hinge: syrup stage"A drop that can hardly be flattened between finger and thumb" points to the firm-to-hard ball range, somewhere in the region of 245-255F on a thermometer. The author is right that this glaze forgives a few degrees either way; boiled well short of that it is likelier to stay tacky on the cake than to dry hard.
- The teacupfulA teacup in American books of this period is variously reckoned, from about half a pint down to a gill, so "1/2 teacupful" is genuinely imprecise. Something in the region of 1/2 cup (4 oz) of water to the pound of sugar gives a standard syrup proportion.
- A pound of sugarGranulated sugar weighs about 7 oz a cup, so a pound is roughly 2 1/4 cups. Six yolks come to about 4 oz. Weigh rather than measure if you have a scale.
- Do not stir the syrupThe instruction is deliberate. Stirring boiling syrup encourages crystals, which turn the finished glaze grainy. Brush the pan sides down with a wet pastry brush instead, and leave the spoon out of it.
- Pouring and beatingAdd the syrup in a thin steady stream against the side of the bowl, not into the beaters, or it will spin into hard threads. A stand mixer does this far better than the hand egg beater the book assumes; the whisk attachment on medium-high is right.
- The return to the fireA minute or two with constant stirring is what sets the glaze; the boiling syrup already takes the yolks well past a safe temperature as it goes in. Keep it moving and take it off the moment it thickens, or the yolks will scramble at the bottom of the pan.
- Flavoring lastExtracts are alcohol-based and flash off in hot syrup. Add them at the very end of the beating, as the text says, when the glaze is nearly too stiff to work.
- Yield and useThis makes on the order of 2 1/2 cups of glaze. It is a pouring glaze, not a spreading frosting: get it onto the cake while it still flows, and let it set at room temperature.
"Glaze" here means a poured, quick-drying coating for sheet cakes destined to be cut into bars and squares for a bakery counter or hotel pastry table. The technique -- boiling sugar to hard-ball and whipping it into egg yolks -- is the same one French pastry knows as a pâte à bombe, the base of buttercreams and frozen bombes; the yolks are what make it yellow, as against the white boiled icing made the same way with beaten egg whites. Before commercial confectioners' sugar was cheap and finely milled, a cooked syrup was the reliable way to get an icing that would set hard and dry without a long air-drying. The author closes by remarking that this one is easiest because the exact syrup point matters less.