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Cocoa Cream Candy
4 tablespoons confectioner's sugar 2 tablespoons boiling water 4 tablespoons cocoa 15 drops vanilla extract Mix sugar and boiling water until smooth; add cocoa and vanilla; mix until creamy. Dust hands with sugar; take up 1/2 teaspoon of mixture and roll. Dust a plate with sugar, and lay balls on to dry about 2 hours; then roll in finely chopped nuts.
An uncooked confection that depends entirely on getting the paste to the right stiffness before rolling. The quantities are small and the ratios unforgiving, so measure level.
- The hinge: consistencyTwo tablespoons of boiling water into four of sugar and four of cocoa gives a stiff paste, not a batter. If it will not hold a ball, work in more confectioner's sugar a teaspoon at a time; if it crumbles, add water a few drops at a time.
- Confectioner's sugarModern powdered sugar contains about 3 percent cornstarch. How much starch the period product carried varied by brand and is hard to pin down, so the paste may come up slightly stiffer or looser than the original; adjust the water by a few drops either way.
- CocoaThis means unsweetened cocoa powder. Natural (non-alkalized) cocoa was the more common type in American kitchens; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder, less acidic sweet. Either works, but the sweet is almost entirely cocoa and sugar, so use one you would drink.
- SweetnessEqual parts cocoa and sugar makes a distinctly bitter candy by current tastes. Many cooks will want to shift the ratio toward two or three parts sugar to one of cocoa.
- Fifteen drops of vanillaRoughly an eighth of a teaspoon. Drop counts were a normal way of measuring extracts when bottles came with a dropper or a narrow lip.
- DryingTwo hours on a sugared plate at room temperature firms the surface enough to hold the nuts. Uncovered and dry is the point; refrigerating draws moisture to the surface and the balls stay tacky.
- YieldHalf-teaspoon portions from this quantity give roughly 18 to 24 marble-sized sweets. Easily doubled.
- KeepingThey contain no dairy, only sugar, cocoa and water, so they keep a week or more in a tin at room temperature, hardening as they go.
Uncooked "cream" candies like this one belong to a genre of home confectionery built around confectioner's sugar, finely milled and widely sold in boxes. The appeal was that they required no thermometer and no sugar boiling, the two steps that made fondant and caramel difficult for amateurs. The word "cream" here refers to the smooth fondant-like texture rather than to any dairy, a usage that survives in the cream centers of boxed chocolates. Packaged cocoa powder in tins was itself a relatively recent domestic staple, following the spread of the press process that separated cocoa butter from the solids, and cookbooks of this era were eager to find uses for it beyond the breakfast cup.