French Icing
Ingredients
Directions
Make the icing
Sift icing sugar into a small saucepan.
Gradually stir in boiling water and heat gently for 1/2 minute without boiling.
Add flavoring essence to taste.
If desired, color the icing with a few drops of carmine or cochineal.
Ice and decorate
Pour icing over the cake and smooth it with a knife dipped in boiling water.
Sprinkle hundreds and thousands over the icing for decoration.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Icing sugar
- Forms the sweet, smooth body of the icing once dissolved in hot water.
- Boiling water
- Dissolves the sugar into a pourable, glossy icing that sets as it cools.
The step that matters
Heat gently without boiling. Heating the icing only briefly and gently helps it dissolve smoothly and stay glossy. Boiling it can make it grainy or cause it to set unevenly on the cake.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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