Home › Recipes › Chocolate Cones
Chocolate Cones
Make fondant same as for Chocolate Creams II. To one-third the quantity add melted Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate and a few drops vanilla, working in with the hands. Shape into small cones and drop on an oiled paper or marble slab. Melt remaining fondant, flavor with vanilla or essence of violet, and color a light lavender, using a violet coloring. Dip cones, separately, and remove to oiled paper. As soon as set, dip bottom of each cone in melted Walter Baker & Co.'s Dot Chocolate, and roll chocolate portion, while still warm, in finely-chopped blanched Jordan almonds. White fondant may be used for the dipping; in which case, roll chocolate-covered portion in chopped pistachio nuts.
A dipped fondant confection that depends almost entirely on temperature control. The recipe assumes you have already made a batch of fondant from the earlier entry in the book and are working at a marble slab.
- The hinge: fondant temperatureMelted fondant should be warmed gently over hot — not boiling — water, to somewhere around 100–110F. Much hotter than that and it tends to lose its gloss and set grainy and dull, which is difficult to reverse.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate liquor, the same thing sold today as unsweetened baking chocolate. Substitute it one for one; do not use a sweetened dark bar, which will slacken the fondant and throw the sugar balance off.
- Dot ChocolateAnother Baker's line, apparently a sweet chocolate sold in small dots suitable for coating. Any tempered dark coating chocolate will do for dipping the base.
- Jordan almondsHere this means the large flat Spanish almond in its raw state, not the sugar-panned candy sold under that name now. Blanch whole raw almonds, dry them thoroughly, then chop fine — damp nuts will bloom the chocolate.
- Essence of violet and violet coloringBoth were standard confectioners' supplies around 1900 and are still sold as violet extract and gel colour, though they are specialist items. Violet flavouring is assertive; a few drops in a pound of fondant is plenty.
- Cross-referenceThe fondant itself is in the book's Chocolate Creams II entry — a boiled sugar syrup poured out and worked until it turns white and opaque. Read that first; this recipe gives no quantities of its own.
- Working surfaceAn oiled marble slab is ideal because it pulls heat quickly and the cones set fast. Chilled parchment on a sheet pan is a workable stand-in; use a neutral oil, very lightly applied.
Choice Recipes was one of the promotional booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts — a chocolate firm whose mills date to the 1760s and whose name still appears on supermarket baking chocolate. The booklets collected recipes credited to the leading cookery teachers of the day, among them Maria Parloa, Sarah Tyson Rorer and Fannie Merritt Farmer. Confections like this one belong to the brief American vogue for home candy-making that ran alongside the professional confectioner's trade around 1900: fondant, a marble slab and a dipping fork were treated as reasonable equipment for an ambitious household. The violet flavouring and lavender tint are a period marker in themselves — floral essences were fashionable in Edwardian sweets, and crystallised violets and violet creams appear across confectionery manuals of the same decades before the taste faded almost entirely from American candy.