Seven Minute Maple Frosting {Paleo}
Paleo-friendly Maple Seven-minute frosting made from whipped egg whites and maple syrup cooked in a double boiler to stabilize it and cook the whites to a safe temperature. This makes enough to generously frost a double layer cake or 24 cupcakes. It is amazing on gingerbread cake or carrot cake.
Today is my younger daughter’s seventh birthday. It is also the birthday of my cookbook, Maple. To celebrate I baked us a cake! Then I frosted it with this dreamy billowy Seven Minute Maple Frosting from the book.
How I Fell in Love with Maple
When Jason first suggested that we start backyard sugaring, I didn’t get it. At all! Here Jase is telling me that it would be “fun” to go out into the 33 degree spring morning to hammer ice cold metal taps into tree trunks and then lug buckets of sap around in the mud all afternoon. And then we would have to figure out how to boil all the sap without steaming up the house. Which he did (with no help from me) by jerry-rigging some sort of crazy stove and hotel pan contraption in the driveway. I’m thinking, as any self-respecting Flatlander would: No thanks Buddy, all that to end up with a cup of syrup? Um, I’m going to BodyPump, I’ll be back in a few hours. Then maybe I’ll watch from the kitchen window.
But then something happened. Friends and neighbors appeared in the driveway and stood around the stove, watched the steam rise. I cooked, with maple and experimented with making baked beans with sap, we ate and drank and everyone lugged sap. It WAS fun!
Now many years later, I know how to tap a tree myself, and what it means when the weather forecast calls for a warm day and a cold night- the sap will be running! I let my daughters drink sap from the tap, and they do their homework in the driveway while we boil.
And I actually look forward to sugaring season. I’ve of course remained true to my Philly girl roots, and I do it all in embarrassingly Flatlander style. I do have some heavy mud boots for trudging around our property during sugaring season. They just happen to have flowers printed on them. I also love when Jase calls me the Sap Wench. A title I suspect he gave me because my lack of skills makes me only really helpful to drive the Sap-mobile around in the evening to collect the sap from the day. All with a shatterproof plastic (BPA Free) glass of white wine in hand.
Through this process of falling in love with Maple, I have gone from serving mugs of sap baked beans to whole menus of maple recipes. To now a full cookbook of maple recipes. All with pure liquid gold in them.
Not Your Granny’s Maple Cookbook
So here it is, Maple: 100 Sweet and Savory Recipes Featuring Pure Maple Syrup {Quirk Books}. On it’s birthday. Written by a flower-printed-boot-wearing, wine swilling, bodypumping flatlander.
And this book is proudly so. Turn for example to page 24, and you’ll find a recipe for Maple Chia Pudding. Or page 84 and you’ll see Kale Skillet Salad with Walnuts and Maple.
Or that you’ll find icons throughout indicating if the recipe is vegan, paleo or gluten-free. Or that in the ingredient notes, I mention that if you choose to cook with canola oil it’s best to choose organic to avoid GMO’s. Or that there isn’t an all too expected stack of pancakes on the cover. It’s pretty clear, pretty quick, that this is not your granny’s maple cookbook.
But that’s the thing. It was never meant to be. There are other maple cookbooks out there that celebrate the history of maple. Or that dive into the best of the tried and true favorites and county fair blue ribbon winning maple recipes. They are great, and they have done too good of a job of tackling the topic from that perspective for me to do so the same way again.
No, this isn’t one of those books. I set out to write this book with my own unique perspective, as a Flatlander who has somehow found herself a backyard sugar-maker, to tell the next chapter in the story of maple syrup. I wanted to create recipes for Vermonters and Flatlanders alike, people like you and me.
Recipes like what we want to cook today. Delicious, interesting, from scratch but healthier. Cooking with a focus on seasonality, whole ingredients and making healthier choices for our families and the earth. This was a book that meant to be filled with dog-eared pages, the spine to be broken and the pages to be stuck together from use.
Signed copies available here
I am really excited for you all to see the book, hold it in your hands and cook from the pages. This book is a celebration of maple as an ingredient and as a way of life in whatever capacity you want to make it so.
Printseven minute maple frosting {paleo}
- Total Time: 15 minutes
- Yield: 6 cups 1x
Description
Paleo-friendly Maple Seven-minute frosting made from whipped egg whites and maple syrup cooked in a double boiler to stabilize it and cook the whites to a safe temperature. This makes enough to generously frost a double layer cake or 24 cupcakes. It is amazing on gingerbread cake or carrot cake.
Ingredients
- 2 egg whites
- 1 cup pure maple syrup, dark or amber
- 1/4 teaspoon white vinegar
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- pinch salt
Instructions
- Set up a double boiler: Bring 1 to 2 inches of water to a boil in a large saucepan or double boiler (8-cup capacity.) If improvising double boiler, make sure a medium heat-proof bowl (8-cup capacity) will fit on the top of the saucepan with out the sides hanging too far over the edges. Reduce heat to maintain a simmer.
- Beat egg whites, maple syrup and vinegar in the medium heat proof bowl with an electric mixer. Place the bowl over the simmering water, and beat until the mixture is glossy, fluffy and the egg-whites hold medium peaks, about 7 minutes. Note it may be necessary to adjust the heat under the bowl to keep a steady simmer.
- Remove the bowl from the heat, and continue beating until the mixture is cooled, 3 to 5 minutes. Beat in vanilla and salt.
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 7 minutes
- Category: Dessert
- Method: Stove Top/Small Appliance
- Cuisine: American
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1/4 cup
- Calories: 38
- Sugar: 9 g
- Sodium: 21 mg
- Fat: 0 g
- Saturated Fat: 0 g
- Carbohydrates: 9 g
- Fiber: 0 g
- Protein: 1 g
Thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!!! So happy to have a buttercream/cream cheese-free icing recipe. This sounds absolutely delicious and perfect for the low-fat pumpkin cake I will be making this weekend. Thanks so much for creating and posting this recipe. Will be back to your website often!
Someone just gave me an idea for this…. add basil and use it to top a lemon pound cake.
Basil and lemon are a great combo. Not sure how the maple would taste with it, so please report back if you do try it.
This is my new favorite cake frosting. I don’t use sugar, and I needed a dairy free maple frosting for a birthday cake. Somehow this escaped my New England upbringing. No more earth balance frosting!!!
I am so glad you tried it! Thanks!
This looks amazing and I can’t wait to try it. Does the frosting keep if I want to use a portion on a later cake? Should I refrigerate the leftover cake after serving? Thank you for your help!
This is not as stable as other types of frosting so I do not recomend waiting to use it on another cake. The air bubbles will collapse as you spread it and the texture will appear rough. Yes after you frost your cake, it’s best to refrigerate leftovers. Unlike buttercream, the texture of this frosting is still good when cold.
It worked so well and sooo easy!! I use to make seven minute icing before Paleo days and thought I would never have it again. This is amazing!! Thankyou!
I love this recipe! I’ve made it 3 times now for paleo lemon cupcakes and a paleo lemon cake, I added lemon zest to the frosting and it was an amazing combination, also paired it with a raspberry sauce. I’m not sure why but I find if they frosting sits for longer than 5 minutes it loses its stiffness and becomes much more watery. Of course whipping it back together doesn’t work since it’s egg whites. Any suggestions? I now make it literally right before I’m about to serve the cake and it was perfect, turned around the cut up the cake and it deflated… still tastes amazing but I want that fluffy texture lol thanks!
I am so happy you like this recipe. I have a few questions: 1. Is there a good seal along the edge of the bowl above the pan of simmering liquid. If it is not getting hot enough it may not be getting to a high enough temperature to “cook” the egg whites which is what makes them stable. 2. What kind of maple syrup are you using? Has it been the same batch of syrup for all three times you’ve made it? It may have too much invert sugar in it, which happens at the end of the sugaring season. Usually late season syrup or Dark/RObust syrup has higher amounts of invert sugar. You can try using Golden (which used to be called Fancy) instead to see if that makes a difference.