Home › Bread and Bread Making › Chocolate Fruit Cookies
Chocolate Fruit Cookies
1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 tablespoons grated chocolate 1 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon boiling water 1 egg 1/2 cup nut meats, finely chopped 1/2 cup seeded raisins, finely chopped 1 cup flour 1 teaspoon baking powder Cream the butter, and add sugar, gradually. Melt chocolate, add remaining sugar and water, and cook one minute. Combine mixtures, and add remaining ingredients. Chill, shape, and bake same as Chocolate Cookies.
A small-batch drop-and-roll cookie from the era when chocolate came in bitter cakes that had to be grated and cooked with sugar and water before it would blend into a batter. The recipe leans on a neighbouring entry for its shaping and baking, so a few numbers have to be supplied.
- The chocolate"Grated chocolate" here means unsweetened baking chocolate, not chips or a sweetened bar. Two tablespoons grated is roughly half an ounce; use about 1/2 oz chopped fine, and account for the extra sweetness if you substitute semisweet.
- Why the chocolate is cooked separatelyMelting the chocolate with the tablespoon of sugar and the boiling water and cooking it a minute makes a smooth syrup rather than a gritty paste. Skip it and the grated chocolate stays in specks through the dough. Let the syrup cool to warm before it meets the creamed butter.
- Baking, since the cross-reference is elsewhereThe referenced Chocolate Cookies recipe is not given here, so its shaping is unknown; "shape" may mean rolled and cut, or formed by hand. If you roll it: chill the dough at least an hour, roll thin on a floured board, cut, and bake in a moderate oven, about 375F, for 8 to 10 minutes until the edges are set. Dough with chocolate in it scorches fast; check early.
- Nut meatsAn old term for shelled nuts, kernels only. Walnuts or pecans suit this dough. Chop them genuinely fine or they will tear the sheet when you roll it.
- Seeded raisinsMuscat raisins of the period contained seeds that had to be picked out. Modern seedless raisins need no preparation, but chop them fine as directed and consider warming them briefly in hot water and drying them so they do not draw moisture from the dough.
- Flour and leaveningOne cup of flour to a quarter cup of butter and a full cup of nuts and fruit makes a stiff, crowded dough. Measure the flour by spooning and levelling, about 4 1/4 oz, or the dough will be too dry to roll without cracking.
- YieldNo yield is given; expect several dozen small cookies, depending how thin they are rolled and how large they are cut. The batch is easily doubled; the dough keeps a day or two wrapped in the refrigerator.
Chocolate came into American home baking as a bitter cake of pressed liquor, sold by firms such as Baker's, and grating it and cooking it with sugar and a little water was one common way of handling it before cocoa powder and sweetened chips made the step unnecessary. Cookery writers of this period often grouped related recipes together, giving a plain version in full and letting the variations follow as short entries that borrow the parent's method, which is why this one ends by pointing back to Chocolate Cookies rather than repeating the shaping and baking.