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Chocolate Creams
Take a piece of fondant (see FONDANT), and work into it whatever flavouring essence is preferred; work it on a baking-board well dusted with icing sugar, and roll it into tiny balls or fancy shapes. Scrape two or three cakes of chocolate into a basin, drop in a tiny piece of butter; add about a dessert-spoonful of fondant, place in a saucepan of boiling water until dissolved. Drop the balls into the dissolved chocolate, which must not be more than lukewarm; or the balls will melt. Coat thoroughly, take them out with a piece of bent wire, place on buttered paper to dry, and put away in a cool dry place. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A Victorian dipped-fondant sweet: sugar centres flavoured to taste, then coated in melted chocolate. The whole thing hinges on keeping the chocolate barely warm, which the original states but does not explain.
- Keep the chocolate coolThe original gives no temperature, only "not more than lukewarm," and its stated reason is that a hot coating will melt the fondant centre. As a modern equivalent, the usual working range for dark chocolate is around 88-90F; a thermometer does the job the Victorian cook did by touch.
- Cakes of chocolateA "cake" was a moulded block of eating chocolate, sweetened and coarser than modern bars. Sizes were not standard, so two or three cakes cannot be converted to a fixed weight; a few ounces is the sense of it. Use a good dark couverture; the extra cocoa butter gives a thinner coat and a cleaner snap.
- The butter and the spoonful of fondantThe recipe does not say why they are there; both would have loosened the coating and softened it. Neither is necessary with couverture, and both work against a properly tempered finish. If the chocolate seems thick, add a little more cocoa butter rather than dairy fat or sugar.
- Melting over waterA basin set in a pan of boiling water is a bain-marie. Take the pan off the heat before the basin goes in, and keep steam and any drop of water away from the chocolate, which will seize into a grainy paste on contact.
- Flavouring essencesPeriod essences were commonly alcoholic tinctures, though essential oils were sold too: vanilla, lemon, peppermint, rose, almond. A few drops per pound of fondant is plenty. Oil-based flavourings blend into fondant more cleanly than water-based ones.
- Fondant to work withStandard poured fondant, kneaded until pliable on a board dusted with icing sugar rather than flour. Chill the shaped centres for twenty minutes or so before dipping; a cold centre firms the coating quickly and reduces the chance of it melting into the chocolate.
- Bent wire and buttered paperThe bent wire is a dipping fork; a table fork or a purpose-made two-prong dipper works the same way. Buttered paper is now parchment or a silicone mat, neither of which needs greasing.
- StoringCool and dry means a cupboard, not the refrigerator. Cold storage draws moisture to the surface and leaves the sweets sticky and bloomed once they come back to room temperature.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives no quantity of fondant and no yield, so any figure is a guess; work to the amount of chocolate you have melted. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." is the standard household budget line of the period, not a modern guide to anything.
Dipped fondant creams belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when two things arrived more or less together: cheap refined sugar that could be boiled into a reliable fondant, and eating chocolate sold in solid cakes rather than as a drinking preparation. Before the cocoa press made it practical to blend cocoa butter back into a smooth, mouldable bar, coating a sweet in chocolate at low temperature is generally thought to have been beyond the reach of a domestic kitchen. Cassell's gives the recipe as a set of instructions for a technique rather than a fixed formula, and the phrasing assumes the reader has already made fondant from the cross-referenced entry. The instruction to work in "whatever flavouring essence is preferred" reflects the Victorian trade in bottled essences, which turned one base sweet into a whole boxful of varieties, and the peppermint cream that survives from that habit is perhaps the most familiar descendant.