Home › Delicious Cocoanut Candies › Cocoanut Cream Rocks
Cocoanut Cream Rocks
1 pound sugar ⅛ teaspoon cream of tartar 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1/2 cup water Few drops vanilla extract 2 squares unsweetened chocolate, melted Boil sugar, water, and cream of tartar 3 minutes after actual boiling commences; remove from fire and stir until the sirup becomes cloudy, then add Dromedary Cocoanut. Flavor one-half of mixture with extract, and flavor second half with chocolate. Drop from a spoon in rocky cakes on waxed paper.
A quick grained-sugar candy of the fondant family, closer to a penuche or maple-cream drop than to a modern macaroon. The whole thing hinges on catching the syrup at the moment it turns cloudy.
- MeasuresA pound of granulated sugar is about 2¼ cups. Two "squares" of unsweetened chocolate are 2 ounces, a square being the standard one-ounce unit of the period.
- The three-minute boilA timed boil is a rough stand-in for the soft-ball stage, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 238F, though what temperature three minutes actually reaches depends on the pan and the heat. Go by a thermometer and treat the timing as a sanity check.
- Why it must go cloudyStirring the cooled syrup forces it to crystallize; the cloudiness is the sugar setting into fine grains, which is what gives these their short, crumbly bite. Stop stirring too early and the drops stay sticky, keep going too long and the mass seizes in the pan.
- Cream of tartarIt inverts some of the sucrose so the crystals stay small and the candy is smooth rather than gritty. It is not a leavener here and should not be left out.
- The coconutDromedary coconut was packaged dry shredded coconut, drier than what is sold now. Modern bagged sweetened flaked coconut is moister and much sweeter; unsweetened desiccated or fine shred gives a texture and sweetness closer to what the recipe assumes.
- Work fast when dividingOnce the mixture grains it firms within a minute or two. Have the melted chocolate ready and the waxed paper laid out before you start stirring, and warm the second bowl slightly so that half does not set before it is flavored.
- If it stiffensA teaspoon or two of hot water worked in will loosen a mass that has gone too far to drop. Leave the drops on the waxed paper until firm.
- YieldRoughly 30 to 36 small drops, half vanilla and half chocolate. They keep a week in a tin, though they dry out and harden as they sit.
Dromedary was the brand name of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates but also a major packer of shredded coconut in the early twentieth century, and its recipe booklets existed to persuade households to keep a package on hand year round. "Rocks" was a standard American name for any small confection or cookie dropped from a spoon in a deliberately irregular lump, and appears through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections attached to everything from spiced fruit cookies to sugar candies like this one. The technique behind it is older than the brand: controlled crystallization of a boiled sugar syrup, with an acid added to keep the grain fine, is the basis of all the fondants, creams and penuches that filled the candy chapters of period cookbooks, and it made a respectable homemade sweet possible without a thermometer or a marble slab.