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Coconut Frosting
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or
½ cup water
½ teaspoon lemon extract
1 teaspoon butter
½ cup shredded or exated coconut
Boil sugar and water to the soft-ball stage (238° F.), then add butter and cook until thick enough to spread. Add flavoring. When cool spread on cake and sprinkle coconut over the top. CANDIES
A plain boiled sugar frosting flavored twice over and finished with coconut. The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting, so read it before you start.
- Reading the garbled ingredient listThe two columns ran together in printing. The ingredients are: 2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1 teaspoon butter, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract, and 1/2 cup shredded or grated coconut ("exated" is a typo for grated).
- The hinge: stop at 238FEverything depends on the thermometer, not on "cook until thick enough to spread." Once syrup passes 238F it climbs fast, and a few degrees over gives a frosting that sets hard and crumbles as you spread it. Pull the pan off the heat at 238F.
- What "cook until thick" really meansThe book leaves this to judgment. In practice a syrup at this stage is handled like fondant: add the butter, let the mixture cool before working it, and beat until it turns opaque and loses its gloss, which is when it becomes spreadable. Worked while hot it stays runny; worked too late it sets before it is on the cake.
- Wash the pan sidesSugar crystals clinging above the syrup will seed the whole batch grainy. Brush the sides down with a wet pastry brush once, cover the pan for the first two minutes so steam does the work, and after that do not stir.
- Extracts go in at the endBoth flavorings are volatile and the instruction to add them after cooking is deliberate. A half teaspoon of lemon extract alongside the vanilla reads as sharp to modern palates; a quarter teaspoon, or the grated zest of half a lemon, is closer to what most cooks want now.
- The coconutPeriod shredded coconut, whether freshly grated or bought dried, was generally drier than today's moist sweetened flake, and was not always sweetened. Sweetened bagged coconut will push an already very sweet frosting further; unsweetened desiccated or freshly grated coconut is the better match, and it is worth toasting lightly for color.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. Two cups of sugar makes a generous batch, enough to cover a layer cake with room to spare; spread quickly once it begins to set.
Boiled-sugar frostings like this one dominated American cake baking from the mid-nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, when confectioners' sugar buttercreams displaced them; they cost almost nothing but sugar and demanded real judgment about syrup stages. The coconut is the tell of the era. Fresh coconuts had reached inland American markets by the 1870s, and packaged dried shredded coconut became a grocery staple around the turn of the century, which is what made a coconut-topped cake ordinary rather than special-occasion. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, sold this volume to the same audience it sold sewing to, where a cup of sugar and a handful of coconut turned a plain layer cake into something worth putting on a stand.