Iced
Friday, November 6, 2009 at 11:02AM 
Vanilla Glacé Icing shines
In Australia we tend to ice cakes with simple icing rather than use frosting. Sure cake shops carry the range of American style swirled & twirled frosted cupcakes and I do love them, but there is something about seeing a simple iced cupcake that evokes childhood memories & is so Australian.
Glacé Icing straight from the source I grew up with 'The Australian's Women's Weekly'.
Ingredients
2 cups (320g) pure icing sugar sifted
1 teaspoon of butter or oil
2 tablespoons of hot water
Method
In a heatproof bowl stir icing sugar, butter and water together to make a thick paste. Place bowl over a small saucepan of simmering water; stir until icing is spreadable. The icing will "just warm", you don't want it to be hot or sugar will crystallise.
Flavour with 1 teaspoon of vanilla and spread onto cupcakes.
Variants
Coffee flavour; dissolve 1 teaspoon of instant coffee into the hot water before adding it to icing sugar
Chocolate; sift 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder with sugar.
You can also use your favourite citrus by adding zest to the icing sugar after sifting and replacing some of the water with citrus juice.
Reader Comments (3)
I love this icing, I make similar one using butter as well. Yummy.
Delicious looking cupcake.
I tried making this but found that the icing set and hardened so quickly once removed from the heat that I didn't have time to spread it smoothly over the cake, and it ended up looking very messy. Should I just heat/melt it for longer? I was concerned about making it too hot, but perhaps I was too timid.
Hi Sarah, this type of icing does set very quickly. There is a few things you can try:
Once your icing is warm remove it from the heat, but keeping the saucepan of hot water underneath the bowl containing the icing... this will keep the icing warm longer without overheating.
If you're icing small cakes you could try dipping rather than spreading the icing on.
let me know how you go with it :)