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Almond Chocolate Creams
CENTERS 1/4 a cup of blanched almonds, chopped fine, 1/2 a cup of fondant, 1/4 a teaspoonful of vanilla, Confectioner's sugar for kneading and shaping,
This is one line from a chapter of bonbon centers: the fondant is made elsewhere in the book, and dipping the finished centers in chocolate is a separate operation. Read it as a formula rather than a method.
- What fondant means hereCooked sugar fondant — sugar, water and a little corn syrup or cream of tartar boiled to about 238F, cooled undisturbed, then worked with a paddle until it turns white and opaque. Half a cup is roughly 5 oz. Commercial rolled fondant sold for cake covering is a different, gelatin- or glycerine-based product and will not behave the same way.
- Ripening the fondantFreshly worked fondant is grainy and stiff. It is meant to rest, covered, for at least a day so the crystals even out; only then does it knead smoothly and take a soft center after dipping.
- Blanching almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water for a minute, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Dry them thoroughly and let them cool before chopping, or the moisture will slacken the fondant.
- KneadingWarm the fondant slightly — a bowl set over warm water, not hot — then work in the almonds and vanilla with the hands on a board dusted with confectioner's sugar. Add sugar only as needed to keep it from sticking; too much makes the centers dry and short.
- ShapingRoll into balls or short ovals about three-quarters of an inch, set them on waxed paper, and leave them uncovered for several hours until a dry crust forms. Centers dipped while damp will weep inside the chocolate shell.
- The dipping, which the recipe assumesBaker's chocolate for dipping must be tempered: melt to about 115F, cool to about 82F with stirring, then bring it back to roughly 88-90F for dark or 86-88F for milk. Untempered chocolate sets soft and streaked. Work in a cool room; a warm kitchen defeats hand-dipping entirely.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. Half a cup of fondant with the almonds worked in will make somewhere around two to three dozen centers at the three-quarter-inch size, depending on how large you roll them. Dipped and stored airtight in a cool place, not the refrigerator, they keep a couple of weeks.
Choice Recipes was one of a long series of pamphlets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts — a firm that traced itself to a chocolate mill founded on the Neponset River in the 1760s and that leaned hard on that lineage in its advertising. The booklets gathered contributions from well-known cooking-school figures of the day, Maria Parloa and Fannie Merritt Farmer among them, and existed to put Baker's premium chocolate into American home kitchens at a moment when candy-making was shifting from a confectioner's trade to a parlor accomplishment. Fondant centers like this one are the backbone of that shift: master one batch of boiled fondant and you can flavor and dip it a dozen ways, which seems to be roughly how these chapters proceed, centers and dipping treated in turn. The almond version is the plainest of them, and the vanilla and chopped nut do the work that a liqueur or a fruit paste does elsewhere in the list.