Home › Christmas Dinners › Holiday Cocoanut Balls
Holiday Cocoanut Balls
1/4 teaspoon maple flavoring 1/3 cup corn syrup 1/4 cup currants 1/2 cup raisins 1 cup shredded cocoanut few grains salt Pour flavoring into corn syrup, add chopped fruits and cocoanut to form stiff loaf. Pack in small cake pan 3/4 in. in thickness. Chill in refrigerator and roll in small balls. Dust with mixture of 1/2 corn starch and 1/2 sugar.
A no-cook Christmas confection: dried fruit and coconut bound with corn syrup, chilled firm, then rolled and dusted. The whole success of it rests on how finely the fruit is chopped and how cold the mass gets.
- Chop finer than you thinkThe mixture holds together only because the currants and raisins are cut small enough to knit with the coconut. Run them through a food processor in short pulses, or chop by hand on a board wiped with a little oil so they do not stick.
- CocoanutRead this as shredded dried coconut; period recipes could mean either the moist sweetened kind or dry desiccated. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works and gives a less cloying result, but it is drier and may need a further teaspoon of syrup to bind.
- Corn syrupLight (clear) corn syrup, not dark; measure it in a cup rinsed with hot water so it releases cleanly. It is the only binder here, so do not reduce it.
- Maple flavoringThis means imitation maple extract, widely sold at the time. Real maple syrup is not a substitute at this quantity, since it would add liquid; if you want true maple flavour, use a maple extract or a few drops of fenugreek-based flavoring.
- CurrantsZante currants, the tiny dried grapes, not fresh red or black currants. If you cannot find them, use more raisins chopped small rather than anything fresh.
- The pan stepPacking the mass 3/4 in. thick into a small pan lets it firm evenly in the cold; the recipe then has you roll it into small balls. An hour in the refrigerator is enough; longer is better, and a very cold mass rolls without sticking.
- The dustingThe recipe calls for half cornstarch, half granulated sugar as an anti-tack coating, but raw cornstarch tastes chalky to modern palates. Confectioners' sugar, which already contains a little starch, does the same job and tastes better.
- Yield and keepingThe quantities make roughly two cups of mixture, so expect a good few dozen small balls depending on how large you roll them. Store them in a tin between layers of waxed paper; they keep a week or two and firm up as they sit.
This belongs to a family of "uncooked candies" that turn up in menu and confectionery books of the interwar years, when corn syrup makers were promoting home candy-making in their recipe booklets and when a sweet that needed no sugar thermometer, no chocolate and no oven was worth printing. The holiday placement fits the ingredients: shredded coconut and boxed dried fruit kept in the pantry, and a tray of small dusted balls stretched a modest amount of material into something that looked like a gift. Imitation maple flavoring was cheap and shelf-stable, a way of suggesting a more expensive ingredient.