Home › Candies › Chocolate Cocoanut Kisses
Chocolate Cocoanut Kisses
To half a cup of sweetened condensed milk add half a cup of confectioners' sugar, six teaspoonfuls of cocoa and enough shredded cocoanut to make a stiff paste. Flavor with vanilla and put in the little paper cases that come for bonbons.
An uncooked candy that depends entirely on the coconut for body, so the ratio is the whole recipe. Everything else is a matter of taste.
- Sweetened condensed milkThis is the thick, sugary canned milk, not evaporated milk. Evaporated milk will not set and the paste will stay slack no matter how much coconut goes in. Half a cup is a little under half a standard 14 oz can.
- CocoaSix teaspoonfuls is two tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder. Natural cocoa was the type most likely to hand in an American kitchen of this period, though Dutch-process was also sold; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder result and works equally well here since there is no leavening involved.
- The coconut is the hingeAdd the shredded coconut a handful at a time and stop when the mass holds a shape on the spoon without slumping. Expect roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, but it varies enormously with how dry the coconut is. Sweetened bagged coconut is moister than the older unsweetened shred and pushes the total sugar high.
- Flavor with vanillaNo quantity is given; half a teaspoon is right for this volume.
- Paper casesThe "little paper cases that come for bonbons" are mini paper candy cups, the same thing sold today for truffles. A teaspoon of paste rolled into a ball sits in one neatly.
- Setting and yieldThe kisses firm up on standing. Leave them uncovered at cool room temperature for several hours, or refrigerate an hour if the kitchen is warm. Yield depends on how large the balls are rolled; teaspoon-sized ones will run to several dozen.
- KeepingStore airtight in the refrigerator and eat within a week. There is no cooked sugar syrup here to preserve them, and the condensed milk means they behave like a dairy sweet rather than a shelf-stable confection.
Uncooked candies like this one belong to a distinct moment in American home cookery, when canned sweetened condensed milk turned confectionery from a thermometer-and-copper-pan discipline into something a child could do at a kitchen table. Condensed milk is generally traced to Gail Borden's mid-nineteenth-century process, but its use as a candy base spread in the early twentieth century, when the can companies printed fudge and "kiss" formulas on their labels and in promotional booklets. Shredded coconut arrived on the same wave: packaged, desiccated coconut had made a tropical ingredient into a pantry staple by roughly the end of the nineteenth century. The word kiss here means only a small drop-sized sweet, the same sense that gave us meringue kisses, and has nothing to do with the wrapped chocolate that bears the name. In a book pitched at keeping the cook comfortable, a candy that needs no fire at all is exactly the point.