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Buttercups
2 cups molasses 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup sugar 1/3 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 cup boiling water Fondant flavored with vanilla Boil ingredients (except fondant) until, when tried in cold water, a firm ball may be formed in the fingers, not stirring until the last few minutes of cooking. Pour on a buttered platter, and when cool enough to handle, pull until light-colored. Shape on a floured board, having strip wide enough to enclose a roll of fondant one inch in diameter. Place fondant on candy, bring edges of candy together, and press firmly over fondant. With both hands pull candy into a long strip. Cut in small pieces; each piece will consist of fondant encircled with molasses candy. Care must be taken that candy is not cooked too long, as it should be soft rather than brittle.
This is a pulled molasses taffy wrapped around a rope of fondant, cut into bite-size pieces. Everything depends on stopping the sugar at the right stage, since the coating must stay chewy enough to pull.
- The hinge: firm ball, not hardA firm ball in cold water is roughly 244-250F on a candy thermometer. Taken well past that the molasses candy sets hard and will crack rather than stretch around the fondant, exactly the fault the last sentence warns against.
- Why you must not stirAgitating a boiling sugar syrup encourages stray crystals to seed the whole batch and turn it grainy. The cream of tartar works against that by inverting some of the sucrose; the stirring permitted at the end is presumably to keep the thickened syrup from scorching.
- The odd measurementOne-third teaspoon of cream of tartar is an unusual quantity and hard to measure; a scant half teaspoon in this volume of syrup behaves the same way. Do not increase it much further or the candy will be sticky and slow to firm.
- Molasses to useUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much lower in sugar. Sorghum syrup is a milder alternative if you have it.
- FondantThe book assumes you have made poured fondant from an earlier page. Commercial rolled fondant works as a substitute; warm it in the hands until it ropes cleanly at one inch thick, and keep it covered so it does not crust while the candy boils.
- Pan and platterUse a heavy saucepan at least four times the volume of the syrup, as molasses foams violently. Butter the platter generously, or use a lightly oiled silicone mat or marble slab, and let the sheet cool at the edges before you touch it.
- PullingButter your hands rather than flour them for the pulling itself; flour only the board for shaping. Pull until the candy lightens to a tan colour and holds ridges, which takes several minutes and cools it quickly.
- Working temperature and weatherPulled candy is a dry-day job. In humid conditions the finished pieces go sticky within hours, so wrap each in waxed paper as the book's contemporaries did.
- YieldTwo cups of molasses plus a cup of sugar gives a large batch, on the order of a pound and a half of finished candy, or roughly sixty small pieces. Halve it for a first attempt, since the pulling must be done before the sheet cools too far.