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Bonbons: Place
Pretty marbles can be made by taking a small piece of two or more colored fondants in the hand and rolling them around until they become smooth and rolling them around until they become smooth and round and beautifully streaked with the different colors. Place on paraffine paper and turn often to prevent their flattening on one side, until firmly set. Roll out some of the different colored fondant in sheets, place one upon the other, roll gently with the rolling pin until the colors are blended together, then cut into bars or squares.
Form fondant into tiny cones, tucking into each cone a bit of preserved ginger, well dried before using. Dip in different colored fondant. Some can be dipped in melted chocolate also.
Work into a half cupful of fondant one teaspoonful of ground cinnamon, flavor with a drop or two of oil of cinnamon, and form into balls. Dip these in chocolate fondant. Other spice bonbons can be made by using a few drops of the oil of allspice, cloves or nutmeg in flavoring the fondant. Peppermint and wintergreen wafers can be made by taking some white fondant and coloring it a pale green and flavoring it with peppermint extract. Drop from a spoon on paper the size of a quarter. Wintergreen wafers can be made by coloring the fondant pink and flavoring with wintergreen extract. Take some fondant and flavor with orange and color a deep yellow; roll out in a long strip about two inches wide. Flavor some more fondant with banana extract and color a light yellow. Form this into a long round stick shape and place in the center of strip. Bring the two edges of the outside fondant together, and press together. Cut off neatly with a knife in half-inch pieces when cool.
This is a page of variations rather than a single recipe: it assumes you already have a batch of cooked fondant, cooled and kneaded, sitting on the bench. Everything below hinges on how the fondant is handled once it is made.
- Fondant temperature is the whole gameFondant for dipping is melted gently over hot (not boiling) water and used only just warm; the recipe itself specifies nothing. Let it get too hot and the sugar crystals coarsen, so the coating dries dull and grainy instead of satiny.
- Paraffine paperWaxed paper. Parchment or a silicone mat works as well or better; the point is only that the centres release cleanly and do not stick while setting.
- Oils versus extractsThe oils named here (cinnamon, clove, allspice, nutmeg) are concentrated flavouring oils, many times stronger than the alcohol-based extracts called for in the mint wafers. A drop or two of oil is genuinely the dose. Buy food-grade candy flavouring oils, not the essential oils sold for aromatherapy.
- Ground cinnamon in the fondantA full teaspoon of ground spice in half a cup of fondant will read as slightly gritty and will dull the colour. Use half that if you want a smooth centre and rely on the oil for the flavour.
- Preserved ginger must be bone dry"Well dried before using" is not a nicety. Syrup clinging to the ginger draws moisture into the surrounding fondant and the centre will slump or weep inside its coating within a day or two. Blot the ginger, then leave it on a rack for several hours.
- ColouringModern gel or paste colours are far more concentrated than the liquid colours of the period; add them on a toothpick and knead in fully, or the fondant will look mottled rather than tinted.
- The rolled two-colour barsRoll the stacked sheets lightly and briefly. The recipe asks that the colours be 'blended together', but over-rolling will work them into a single muddy tone rather than the streaked bar the effect depends on.
- The orange-and-banana rollCut the half-inch pieces with a thin blade wiped between cuts, and only once the log has firmed for an hour or so. Warm fondant smears at the cut face.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Store them in a single layer in a tin at cool room temperature; refrigeration causes condensation and sticky surfaces.
Home candy-making was a genuine craze in American households, often traced to the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, and books like this one exist because fondant put a confectioner's basic material within reach of anyone with a sugar thermometer and a marble slab. Everything on this page is a bonbon in the older, narrower sense: a flavoured or filled centre enrobed in a second coat of fondant, the word simply French for "good-good," nursery reduplication that stuck. The variations here reflect what a well-stocked pantry of the period held: preserved ginger from the Chinese import trade, flavouring oils sold by the dram at the druggist, and wintergreen, a distinctly North American taste drawn from teaberry that has largely faded from the candy shelf outside of a few survivors. The instruction to turn the marbled balls often while they set answers to a real property of the material: fondant slumps on whichever side it rests.