Plain Water Icing
Ingredients
Directions
Make the icing
Mix the boiling water and icing sugar until you achieve a consistency similar to good cream.
Ice the cake
Use the icing while it is warm.
To prevent the icing from cooling, place the bowl with icing in another bowl of hot water while icing.
Smooth the icing on a large cake using a knife dipped in hot water.
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, thick body of the icing as it dissolves in the liquid.
- Boiling water
- Dissolves the sugar and thins it to a smooth, spreadable consistency.
The step that matters
Keeping the icing warm while spreading. Icing thickens and sets as it cools, so a cool icing becomes stiff and hard to spread smoothly. Keeping the bowl in hot water and dipping the knife in hot water keeps it fluid.
“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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