Home › Ornamental Icing › To Make Water Icing
To Make Water Icing
Take any quantity of powdered sugar you require, add cold water enough to it to form a thick paste (remember, it will not take much); beat well, and if too thin so that it runs too much, add a little more sugar. To every pound of sugar, add as much cream of tartar as will lie on a twenty-five cent piece (a level teaspoonful); when this icing is prepared, spread it with a knife over the cake, and allow it to dry; you can then ornament or decorate it with icing sugar in the same manner as for a bride's cake, or use a sweet jelly, such as red currant" or "quince." 66 This water icing may also be colored a light shade of pink with "cochineal," or a light cream color with saffron. For a mauve color, add a drop of indigo blue to the pink color; but remember none of these colors must be heavy, as they are objectionable and in bad taste. Water icing is used for tops of pound, sponge, and other cakes, also for tops of jelly cakes. (See design for jelly cake, page 353.)
This is what would now be called a glacé or water icing: sugar and water only, with no egg white, spread thin and left to set to a matte shell. The whole thing hinges on adding the water a few drops at a time.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar, which contains a little cornstarch, works and gives a slightly firmer set. Sift it before mixing or the paste will stay lumpy no matter how long it is beaten.
- How much waterThe warning that it will not take much is the important line. Reckon on roughly 4 teaspoons of water per cup (4 oz) of sugar, added in stages; a pound of sugar takes only 4 to 5 tablespoons in total.
- Cream of tartarThe book's own gloss, a level teaspoonful per pound of sugar, is the usable measure. It was added to keep the icing white and smooth, on the understanding that it stopped the sugar setting into a grainy crust as it dried.
- YieldA pound of sugar makes far more than most cakes need. One cup of sugar glazes the top of a single 8- or 9-inch layer with a little to spare.
- DryingSpread it with a warm palette knife and leave the cake uncovered at room temperature. A thin coat should skin over in roughly half an hour and be firm enough to pipe on within a couple of hours; damp weather will slow it considerably.
- ColouringCochineal and saffron are both still food ingredients, cochineal now sold as carmine. Indigo blue is not: the "blue" kept in nineteenth-century houses was a laundry product, and nothing of that sort belongs in icing. Use food-grade colour for the mauve.
- Decorating over the topThe "icing sugar" meant for piping is almost certainly an egg-white ornamental icing of the royal type. Currant or quince jelly, warmed and brushed on, gives the glossy contrast the text is after without a second batch.
Water icing is the plainest member of the icing family: sugar, liquid, nothing else. Nineteenth-century American books separate it firmly from royal or "ornamental" icing, which is beaten with egg white until it sets hard enough to hold piped work, and from boiled icing, which requires a sugar thermometer or a practised hand with the thread stage. Water icing needed neither. The colouring advice is a period fingerprint. Cochineal, made from dried scale insects, and saffron were among the common kitchen dyes of the era, and the insistence that the tints stay pale reflects a broader Victorian confectionery aesthetic in which strong colour on a cake read as vulgar.