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Chocolate Coating
About 1 cup of fondant, 2 squares Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla extract, Few drops of water, as needed, Halves of blanched almonds.
Mix the chopped almonds with the fondant and vanilla; add confectioner's sugar, a little at a time, and knead the mass thoroughly, on a marble or large platter; shape into a long roll, then cut into small pieces of the same size. Shape these into balls a generous half inch in diameter and leave them about an hour to harden on the outside. Put the fondant for the coating and the chocolate (shaved or broken in pieces) in a double boiler (with hot water in the lower receptacle); add the vanilla and the water and beat until melted; take out the spoon and put in a dipping fork (a wire fork costing about ten cents), beat the fondant, to keep it from crusting and drop in a "center;" with the fork cover it with fondant; put the fork under it and lift it out, scrape the fork lightly on the edge of the dish, to remove superfluous candy, turn the fork over and drop the bonbon onto waxed paper. Make a design with the fork in taking it from the candy. At once press half of a blanched almond on the top of the candy, or the design made with the fork will suffice. If at any time the coating be too thick, add a few drops of water. If any be left over, use it to coat whole nuts or cherries.
This is a fondant-dipped bonbon rather than a tempered chocolate one, which changes almost everything about how it behaves. The coating is sugar syrup carrying cocoa solids, so it tolerates water and never needs tempering.
- Two recipes in oneThe first half makes almond fondant centers, the second half makes the chocolate fondant coating. The ingredient list gives only about a cup of fondant, yet fondant is called for in both places, so a further quantity will be needed; the recipe does not say which use the listed cup is meant to cover.
- An ambiguity worth namingThe ingredient line calls for halves of blanched almonds, but the method says to knead chopped almonds into the centers. Both are wanted: chopped for the interior, halves for the garnish. No quantity is given for either, nor for the confectioner's sugar, which is added by feel until the mass is stiff enough to roll.
- Baker's Premium No. 1This was unsweetened chocolate, sold in squares conventionally reckoned at an ounce each, so two squares is about two ounces. Modern packaging is not necessarily divided the same way, so weigh rather than count squares. Do not substitute semisweet, which will make the coating cloying against an already sugar-heavy fondant.
- Heat levelKeep the water in the lower pan hot but well off the boil. Fondant driven much above about 140F loses its fine crystal structure and dries dull and grainy on the bonbon instead of setting with a soft sheen.
- Water is the thinnerAdding drops of water to melted chocolate would seize a true couverture. Here it is correct, because the base is fondant. Add a few drops at a time and stir in fully before judging the consistency.
- Keep it movingThe instruction to keep beating the fondant between dips is the hinge of the recipe. Left standing, the surface crusts, and that crust drags into the coating as grit.
- The dipping forkA ten-cent wire fork is now sold as a chocolate dipping fork, two or three tines with a slight curve. A regular table fork works if the tines are long; the loop-style fork is easier for round centers.
- Timing the centersThe hour of air-drying is not optional. A skinned-over center holds its shape in the warm coating; a fresh one slumps and bleeds into the fondant.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Store them in a single layer in a cool room, not the refrigerator, where fondant sweats and turns sticky. They are best within a week.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was the oldest chocolate concern in the United States, and its Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate sold in cakes and squares. Booklets like this one were advertising in the guise of instruction: the company gave away recipe collections, often compiled by well-known cookery writers and household-economics teachers, on the reasonable theory that a household that learned to dip bonbons would keep buying squares of chocolate. The technique itself belongs to a specific moment. Home candy-making was a popular accomplishment around the turn of the twentieth century, taught in cooking schools alongside cake and jelly, and it relied on fondant because fondant is forgiving where tempered chocolate is not, needing no thermometer and no careful cooling curve. A marble slab, a cheap wire fork, and a double boiler put the confectioner's window display within reach of a home kitchen, which is precisely what the booklet was selling.