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Rose Chocolate Creams
Fondant, Damask rose color-paste, 1/2 to 1 whole teaspoonful of rose extract, 1/2 a pound of Baker's "Dot" Chocolate.
Put a part or the whole of the fondant into a double boiler over boiling water. With the point of a toothpick take up a little of the color-paste and add to the fondant; add the extract and stir until the mixture is hot, thin and evenly tinted. With two teaspoons drop the mixture into impressions made in starch; it should be hot and thin enough to run level on top. When the shapes are cold, remove from the starch, brush carefully and coat with "Dot" Chocolate.
This is a starch-mogul recipe scaled down to a home kitchen: fondant thinned by heat, cast in a tray of dried cornstarch, then hand-dipped. The hinge is temperature — fondant held above about 165F loses its fine grain and dries dull and grainy instead of creamy.
- Baker's "Dot" ChocolateA coating chocolate sold by Walter Baker & Co. for dipping. It is long gone; use a good dark couverture, tempered, or a compound coating if you want to skip tempering. Half a pound will coat roughly forty to fifty small centers with the usual dipping surplus, though the recipe itself gives no yield.
- Fondant quantityThe original gives no weight. A pound of fondant is a sensible batch and matches the half pound of coating; "a part or the whole" simply means melt only as much as you can cast before it stiffens.
- Damask rose color-pasteA concentrated pink paste colouring, applied on a toothpick because a drop would overwhelm the batch. Any modern gel colour works the same way — the shade wanted is a pale blush, not fuchsia.
- Rose extractRose flavourings vary enormously in strength, and rose absolute or modern rose oil is far stronger than rose water. Start with a quarter teaspoon of rose water or two or three drops of rose flavouring and taste; a full teaspoon of anything concentrated will taste like soap.
- Heating the fondantDouble boiler over boiling water, stirring until it is "hot, thin and evenly tinted." The recipe gives no temperature; keep the heat gentle, as overheated fondant sets dull and grainy. Do not stir vigorously or let it scorch on the sides; if it thickens as you work, thin it with a teaspoon of hot water or sugar syrup rather than more heat.
- The starch trayFill a shallow pan with cornstarch thoroughly dried in a low oven and cooled, then level it and press impressions with a rounded shape — the end of a cork or a wooden ball on a stick is a commonly suggested home substitute for the confectioner's moulding board. The starch must be bone dry or the centers pick up moisture and the surface pits.
- Setting and cleaningLeave the cast centers in the starch until fully cold and firm, an hour or more depending on room temperature. Lift them out, brush off every trace of starch with a soft dry pastry brush, and dip promptly; leftover starch shows as a chalky film under the chocolate.
- YieldA pound of fondant cast in small ovals gives about four dozen creams. They keep two to three weeks in a cool room, sealed; the rose flavour fades faster than that.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts — a chocolate mill whose Dorchester works date from 1765, founded by Hannon and James Baker, with Baker taking sole control around 1780, and one of the oldest food businesses in the United States — issued a long series of small recipe booklets, of which Choice Recipes is one, to teach home cooks uses for its products and to name those products on every page. "Dot" chocolate, called for here, was the company's dipping coating; the recipe is as much an advertisement as an instruction. The starch-tray method it describes was borrowed straight from the commercial confectioner: candy plants cast fondant and jelly centers in trays of dried starch, at first hand-filled, with mechanised starch moguls a later development, and booklets like this one showed the household how to imitate the process with a baking pan and a cork. Rose was among the standard cream flavours of the period, alongside violet, vanilla and wintergreen — floral flavourings were a normal part of the American sweet counter well into the 1920s, and fell out of favour later, which is why a rose-scented chocolate now reads as unusual rather than ordinary.