Home › Doughnuts and Cookies › Cornflake Kisses
Cornflake Kisses
2 cups corn flakes 2 whites of eggs 1 cup granulated sugar 1 tsp. vanilla 1 cup cocoanut Beat eggs, add sugar slowly and beat 2 minutes, add other ingredients, and stir well. Drop by teaspoonfuis on oiled paper and bake in a very moderate oven. recipe makes 21/2 dozens.
A meringue drop stiffened with cereal and coconut, from the era when corn flakes were a fashionable baking ingredient rather than only a breakfast food. The whole recipe hinges on getting the whites stiff enough to hold the bulky additions.
- "Very moderate oven"Period tables put this at roughly 325F, and a little lower does no harm here. Meringue-based kisses are drying more than baking; too hot and the sugar caramelises and the bottoms scorch before the centres set. Bake until set and dry, and let them cool on the paper.
- Beat the whites firstThe instruction "beat eggs, add sugar slowly" assumes you take the whites to soft peaks before any sugar goes in, then beat to a stiff, glossy meringue. Sugar added too early gives a slack batter that spreads into flat wafers.
- CocoanutPeriod recipes usually meant dried shredded coconut, often unsweetened, sold loose or in packets, though sweetened moist packs were also on the market. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make these markedly sweeter; unsweetened desiccated coconut is the closer match.
- Corn flakesThe recipe says to stir well, but a light hand keeps the flakes in recognisable pieces; crushed to crumbs the texture turns pasty.
- Oiled paperThis is greased parchment or butter paper. Parchment or a silicone mat needs no oil, and meringues release from it far more cleanly than from a greased sheet.
- Yield and keepingTwo and a half dozen small kisses. They soften quickly in humid air; store airtight the same day, and do not refrigerate.
Recipes like this one belong to the first decades of packaged breakfast cereal, when Battle Creek's flaked corn moved out of the cereal bowl and into the baking chapter of community cookbooks. Manufacturers are often said to have encouraged the shift, and church and club cookbooks such as the Philathea absorbed such recipes quickly â the Philathea class was an adult Bible-study movement for young women, and its fundraising cookbooks gathered whatever the members were actually baking. "Kisses" had long meant a small baked meringue drop; joining that older form to two economical pantry bulkers, cereal and desiccated coconut, produced a cookie with no butter and no flour, and versions of it kept turning up in wartime and thrift-minded collections.