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Cherry Creams for Decorating
Choose nice large candied or preserved cherries.
Cut each cherry with the scissors sufficient to have it open into four petals. Put a tiny ball of fondant between the petals, stick a little stem and leaf of angelica at the bottom, and use for decorating small cakes.
Less a recipe than an assembly technique, and it depends entirely on the quality of the three components. A few notes on sourcing and handling.
- FondantThe book means poured or kneaded sugar fondant, not the rolled plastic fondant sold for covering cakes. Ready-made rolled fondant will work for the ball if you tint and warm it slightly in the hands, but true fondant gives the soft creamy centre intended here.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once a fixture of the decorator's cupboard, is now sold mainly by specialist confectioners and online. Candied citron peel dyed green, or thin strips of green-tinted marzipan, stand in for the stems and leaves.
- Candied vs. preserved cherriesCandied (glacé) cherries are firm and dry enough to hold the four petals open. Preserved cherries in syrup must be drained and blotted thoroughly or the fondant will weep and the whole thing will slump.
- Cutting the petalsSmall sharp scissors, cutting down from the top toward the base and stopping short of it, so the four sections stay joined. Chilling the cherries briefly first may make the cuts cleaner and help stop the fruit tearing.
- ScaleRoll the fondant ball smaller than looks right — about the size of a pea for a standard glacé cherry. Too large and it forces the petals flat instead of holding them open like a flower.
- Yield and keepingA pound of glacé cherries gives you sixty-odd flowers, though the count varies a good deal with the size of cherry. Made ahead they keep several days in a single layer in a covered tin at room temperature; refrigeration draws moisture to the surface and dulls the gloss.
Decorations of this kind are often associated with an era when a home cook might finish a cake as a professional would, and the pantry held candied fruit for exactly that purpose. Angelica — the candied stem of Angelica archangelica — was the standard green in the confectioner's palette long before food colouring was cheap and reliable, and it was traditionally said to hold both its colour and its shape, though candied angelica is commonly dyed green. It appears alongside glacé cherries in British and American cake decoration, a pairing generally traced to the nineteenth century, and one so conventional that it survived well into the mid-twentieth century on trifles, fruitcakes and petits fours. The cherry cut open into petals is a small piece of the same thinking that produced radish roses and tomato baskets: a garnish made with scissors rather than a piping bag, by a cook who had no pastry chef and made do.