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Uncooked Coffee Fondant
1 1/2 tablespoons butter 2 3/4 cups soft brown sugar 1 tablespoon cream 2 tablespoons coffee essence 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter with a little sugar. Add the cream slowly and work in more sugar. Then add the coffee and keep working in the sugar. Salt may be added to the coffee. Add the vanilla and work in all the sugar, knead well, cover with damp cloth for an hour. Put into a jar and keep on hand for coffee confections.
This is an uncooked fondant: no boiling, no thermometer, just sugar worked into fat and liquid until it forms a pliable paste. Success depends almost entirely on the texture of the sugar you start with.
- The hinge: sugar texture"Soft brown sugar" means fine-grained, moist light brown sugar, not the coarse crystals of demerara or turbinado. Any grit in the sugar stays grit in the finished fondant, so sift it and break up every lump before you begin.
- Coffee essenceA sweetened liquid coffee concentrate of the Camp Coffee type, still sold in bottles. Substitute 2 tablespoons of espresso or of very strong coffee reduced to a syrup; instant coffee dissolved in a teaspoon of hot water also works, though it makes a slightly thinner paste, so hold back a little of the sugar.
- The saltThe aside about salt is worth taking up. A pinch stirred into the coffee sharpens both the coffee and the molasses notes in the brown sugar, which otherwise reads flat and one-dimensional.
- Work it cold but not hardButter at cool room temperature, soft enough to cream but not oily, works best; the recipe itself gives no temperature. If it warms and greases out, the fondant may weep; chill the mass briefly and knead again.
- The damp clothThe hour under a damp cloth chiefly keeps the surface from drying and crusting while the paste settles. If the cloth is very wet, cover the bowl rather than laying it directly on the fondant.
- Yield and storageSomewhere between 1 1/4 and 1 1/2 lb of fondant depending on how firmly the sugar is packed, enough for a few dozen small centres. The recipe says to put it in a jar and keep it on hand; in a warm modern kitchen the refrigerator is the safer choice, and a couple of weeks is a reasonable limit.
- What to do with it"Coffee confections" probably covers rolled centres for dipping in chocolate, fondant sandwiched between walnut halves, or a stuffing for dates and prunes. Thinned with a spoonful of hot water it could also serve as a quick icing.
Uncooked fondant belongs to a strand of home candy-making associated with the decades either side of 1900, when confectionery manuals offered "no-cook" fondants to households without a candy thermometer or a marble slab. The trick is that sugar, fat and a very small quantity of liquid will form a workable paste by mechanical kneading alone, avoiding the whole business of boiling to the soft-ball stage and beating the syrup as it cools. Coffee essence, a bottled sweetened coffee-and-chicory concentrate of the Camp type sold in Britain and its export markets from the later nineteenth century, gave a reliable coffee flavour without adding the water that brewed coffee would have introduced. The instruction to keep a jar on hand marks it as a working base rather than a finished dish.