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Chocolate Creams--Best
Make the white inside the same as for the preceding and make the balls up in any shape desired. Instead of common chocolate merely melted dip them in this chocolate icing: 1 cup sugar. 4 tablespoonfuls water. 3 ounces common chocolate. Grate the chocolate and set it on with the sugar and water to melt gradually in a place not hot enough to burn it. When it has at length become boiling hot beat it to thoroughly mix, and dip in the articles to be glazed while it is hot.
This is a dipping glaze rather than tempered chocolate: a sugar syrup carrying grated chocolate, applied hot and left to set to a matte, slightly crisp shell. The centers come from the preceding recipe in the book, a boiled-sugar fondant cream.
- The hinge: keep everything hotThe syrup thickens and grains the moment it cools, and a cold center chills it on contact. Set the pan of glaze over a bowl of hot water while you work, and have the fondant balls at room temperature, firm but not refrigerated.
- "Common chocolate"In nineteenth-century American usage this generally means plain unsweetened cake chocolate, the kind sold in bricks or blocks for grating. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, not cocoa powder and not chips, which contain added sugar and stabilizers that change the set.
- Grating still mattersGrated chocolate dissolves into the syrup before it can scorch or seize. Chopping fine is acceptable; large chunks will sit in the pan and burn against the bottom.
- "A place not hot enough to burn it"Probably the cooler part of a range top; the recipe does not say. The equivalent is the lowest burner setting with frequent stirring, or a bowl set over barely simmering water until the chocolate and sugar have melted together.
- "Boiling hot" is vagueThe recipe gives no temperature and no thread or ball test, so the point at which to stop is genuinely unspecified. A syrup of this ratio taken to roughly the soft-ball stage should set to a firm shell; taken further it is likely to turn opaque and brittle, and a candy thermometer is the surest way to repeat a result you like.
- MeasuresFour tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup, and the proportion of liquid to sugar is low, so it comes to temperature quickly. Three ounces of chocolate is three standard baking squares.
- DippingA dipping fork or two table forks work better than fingers with a syrup this hot. Set the finished pieces on parchment or a lightly oiled marble slab; waxed paper will stick if the glaze is still fluid.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; this quantity of glaze will coat a modest batch of small creams, depending on how thickly you dip. Sugar-glazed creams stay good for a few days in a tin; the coating will weep in a humid kitchen or a refrigerator.
Dipped chocolate creams were a novelty turned commodity in the second half of the nineteenth century, when cheap refined sugar and block chocolate put confectionery within reach of a home cook or a small bakeshop. Books like this one taught the two-part method that still underlies boxed chocolates: a boiled fondant center made in bulk, then a coating applied by hand. The distinction the recipe draws in its first line is the interesting part. Merely melted unsweetened chocolate sets dull and streaky and tastes bitter against a sweet center, so the confectioner's fix, before tempering was widely understood outside the trade, was to build the coating on a sugar syrup instead. The title's blunt "Best" reads, plausibly enough, as the author making a case against the simpler method printed just above it.