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Cream Maple Sugar Frosting
1 lb. soft maple sugar 1 cup cream Break sugar in small pieces, put in saucepan with cream, and stir occasionally until sugar is dissolved. Boil without stirring until a ball can be formed when mixture is tried in cold water. Beat until of right consistency to spread.
This is maple fudge in spreadable form: a two-ingredient boiled frosting that stands or falls on the temperature you take it to and when you stop beating it.
- The hinge: soft-ball stageThe cold-water test means roughly 236-240F on a candy thermometer. Below that the frosting may never set and will run off the cake; taken much above that it sets firm and crumbly and is hard to spread.
- "Soft" maple sugarThis most likely meant moist, freshly made maple sugar sold in cakes, which broke up easily and still held some syrup, though the recipe does not define the term. Modern granulated maple sugar is drier and harder; use roughly 2 1/4 cups by volume for the pound and expect it to need longer to dissolve.
- CreamUse heavy cream, 36% or more. Half-and-half or milk has too much water and lengthens the boil, which darkens the maple flavor toward caramel.
- Do not stir after it boilsThe instruction is deliberate. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup seeds crystals and gives a gritty frosting. Wash any crystals off the pan sides with a wet brush before the boil starts, then leave it alone.
- BeatingCool the syrup to about 110F before beating, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens, roughly 5 to 10 minutes by hand. "Right consistency to spread" is the moment it holds a soft ridge; it stiffens fast after that, so have the cake ready.
- If it seizesA frosting that goes stiff and grainy in the bowl can be loosened with a spoonful of hot cream beaten in, one spoonful at a time.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough to cover a two-layer 9-inch cake or a 9x13 sheet; a generous filling as well as a coating will want more.
Maple sugar, not maple syrup, was the older New England form of the sweetener: sap was boiled down past the syrup stage and poured into wooden molds, and the resulting cakes were sold by the pound at country stores and shaved or broken as needed. Because it kept without canning, sugar was for most of the nineteenth century the more practical product, and cookbooks of the period call for it by weight in exactly this way. The frosting itself is a plain boiled fondant, made by the familiar soft-ball-and-beat method; the maple one is the New England variant, cheap in a sugaring region and needing no flavoring extract at all.