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Fondant Icing
The mixture in which small cakes are dipped for icing is fondant, the recipe for which may be found in chapter on Confections. Cakes for dipping must first be glazed. To Glaze Cakes. Beat white of one egg slightly, and add one tablespoon powdered sugar. Apply with a brush to top and sides of cakes. After glazing, cakes should stand over night before dipping.
To Dip Cakes. Melt fondant over hot water, and color and flavor as desired. Stir, to prevent crust from forming on top. Take cake to be dipped on a three-tined fork and lower in fondant three-fourths the depth of cake. Remove from fondant, invert, and slip from fork to a board. Decorate with ornamental frosting and nut meat, candied cherries, angelica, or candied violets. For small ornamented cakes, pound cake mixture is baked a little more than one inch thick in shallow pans, and when cool cut in squares, diamonds, triangles, circles, crescents, etc.
This is the petit four method: a thin sheet of pound cake, cut into shapes, sealed with a glaze, then dipped in melted fondant. The dipping technique is sound and still taught; the overnight raw-egg glaze is the part that has not survived.
- Why the cautionThe glaze is raw egg white brushed onto cake and then left to stand overnight at room temperature. Nothing in the process afterward heats it: fondant is dipped at roughly body temperature, far below any pasteurising range, so the egg stays raw through to serving. A night at room temperature is ample time for Salmonella on or in the shell egg to multiply in a moist protein film. Use a current petit four recipe for the sealing step rather than adapting this one.
- What the glaze was forThe point of the egg wash was practical, not decorative: it seals the crumb so loose cake does not shed into the fondant pot and cloud it, and it gives the fondant a smooth surface to grip. Modern practice achieves the same seal with a thin coat of warmed apricot glaze or a brushing of simple syrup.
- Fondant temperature is the hingePoured fondant is warmed over hot water; the recipe gives no temperature, but confectionery guidance generally puts the working range at about 100°F and warns against going much above 110°F. Overheated fondant loses its gloss and dries dull; too cool and it coats too thickly and sets before it levels. Thin with a spoonful of hot water or sugar syrup, never with more heat.
- Stirring and crustingThe instruction to stir is not fussiness. Fondant skins over quickly if left to sit, and crust stirred back in can seed the batch with crystals and turn it grainy.
- The three-tined forkA dipping fork with widely spaced tines lets the excess run off cleanly. A regular table fork or a small offset spatula works; the cake is dipped upside down, top first, to three-quarters depth, so the fondant covers the top and sides and the bare bottom is what sits on the board.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, bright green and faintly musky, was a standard decorating item in 1896 and is now a specialty import. Candied citrus peel, candied violets or crystallised rose petals fill the same role.
- Cake thickness and cuttingThe sheet is baked 'a little more than one inch thick'; the recipe does not specify the size of the cut pieces. Chill or at least thoroughly cool the sheet before cutting, and use a long thin blade wiped between cuts; warm pound cake tears and the ragged edge shows through the fondant.
Fondant-dipped petits fours reached American cookbooks from the French confectioner's trade, where fondant — sugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, cooled undisturbed, then worked until it crystallises into an opaque white paste — was the everyday medium for coating creams and bonbons. The placement of the actual fondant recipe in the Confections chapter rather than here is consistent with that origin: it was a candy-maker's material borrowed by the cake-maker. Nut meats, candied cherries, angelica and candied violets were common confectioner's decorations of the period.