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Candies and Candy Making: Place
To Coat Chocolate Creams. - Place the pan of melted chocolate in a larger pan of boiling water on a very hot soapstone. This keeps the chocolate melted. Place the creams on waxed paper at the left, and a sheet of waxed paper to receive the coated chocolates at the right. Take up the creams by thrusting them through with a fork or a hatpin, dip them quickly in the chocolate, and slip them off on the waxed paper.
Or, holding the cream on a fork or 00000000 0000000 "Dip Them Quickly in the Chocolate."
Let hatpin, pour the melted chocolate over them from a teaspoon. the creams stand twenty-four hours or more to harden.
This is a technique page rather than a formula: it assumes you already have a tray of fondant centers and only need to get chocolate around them. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: keep the chocolate warm, not hotThe whole point of the boiling water and the hot soapstone is to hold the coating fluid without cooking it. Water at a full boil will push dark chocolate well past its working range; a bowl over hot water off the heat, held at 88-90F for dark and 84-86F for milk, does the job. Chocolate held much above roughly 120F scorches and separates, and a single drop of water from the pan below will seize the whole bowl into a grainy mass.
- Soapstone slabA thick soapstone slab was set on the range to act as a heat reservoir, giving gentle even warmth with no flame. A heating pad on low, a bowl of warm water swapped out as it cools, or an electric melter is the modern equivalent.
- What kind of chocolate"Melted chocolate" here means real chocolate, and untempered real chocolate sets soft and streaky. Either temper proper couverture, or use a coating chocolate (confectioner's coating, compound coating) which contains a vegetable fat and needs no tempering. Chocolate chips are formulated to hold their shape and flow badly as a dip.
- The hatpinA hatpin was a long steel pin, a common enough item while large hats were in fashion. Use a dipping fork, a bamboo skewer, or a two-tine cocktail fork. Whatever you use, note that piercing the center leaves a hole in the shell where the fondant can weep; professional dipping cradles the center on the fork instead of spearing it.
- The stray line of typeThe run of zeros and the phrase in quotation marks are the caption of an illustration that sat in the middle of the paragraph. Read the instruction as: hold the cream on a fork or hatpin and pour the melted chocolate over it from a teaspoon.
- Twenty-four hours to hardenProperly tempered chocolate sets firm in 10 to 20 minutes at cool room temperature. The long rest may reflect untempered chocolate in an unheated pantry, and fondant centers do soften against the shell over time. Overnight in a cool, dry room is plenty; do not refrigerate, as condensation dulls the surface.
- Working conditionsDip on a dry, cool day if you can. A warm humid kitchen keeps the coating from setting and draws moisture into the fondant, which is the usual cause of shells that crack and leak.
- Setup and scaleThe left-to-right arrangement of waxed paper is sound practice and worth keeping. The recipe names no quantity; as a rough guide, allow something on the order of a pound of coating chocolate for forty or fifty small centers, since dipping needs a pool deep enough to submerge them and the bowl thickens as it cools and as crumbs accumulate.
Hand-dipped chocolate creams were a luxury confection of the late nineteenth century, and the reason was partly industrial: cheap cocoa butter and eating chocolate became widely available only after the Dutch press, and mechanized fondant production made soft sugar centers easier to turn out in quantity. Candy shops employed "dippers," largely women, who worked at marble-topped benches, and the mark left on top of the shell as the fork came away was treated as a sign of a good hand. Household manuals of this period routinely taught the trade motions of such work so that a family could imitate a shop product at home. The tempering of chocolate was not yet understood in the terms a modern confectioner uses; the advice to hold the pan over boiling water and then leave the finished sweets a full day to firm is an empirical workaround for a crystallization process nobody had yet described.