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Bonbons (Centres of bonbons are made)
The centres of bonbons are made of fondant shaped in small balls. If White Fondant is used, flavor as desired, balls . If White Fondant is used, flavor as desired, vanilla being usually preferred. For cocoanut centres, work as much shredded coacoanut as possible into a small quantity of fondant; for nut centres, surround pieces of nut meat with fondant, using just enough to cover. French candied cherries are often used in this way. Allow balls to stand over night, and dip the following day.
To Dip Bonbons. Put fondant in saucepan, and melt over hot water; color and flavor as desired. In coloring fondant, dip a small wooden skewer in coloring paste, take up a small quantity, and dip skewer in fondant. If care is not taken, the color is apt to be too intense. During dipping, keep fondant over hot water that it may be kept of right consistency. For dipping, use a two-tined fork or confectioners' bonbon dipper. Drop centres in fondant one at a time, stir until covered, remove from fondant, put on oiled paper, and bring end of dipper over the top of bonbon, thus leaving a tail-piece which shows that bonbons have been hand dipped. Stir fondant between dippings to prevent a crust from forming.
This is the finishing half of a fondant recipe: it assumes you already have a batch of cooked white fondant on hand and tells you how to turn it into filled, hand-dipped bonbons. The whole thing hinges on temperature control in the melting pan.
- Keep the dipping fondant barely warmMelt the fondant in a bowl or pan set over hot, not boiling, water, as the recipe directs, and keep it only lukewarm. Fondant that is allowed to get hot dries dull and streaked instead of setting to a firm matte shell. The recipe itself names no temperature.
- Fondant is not the rolled kind"Fondant" here means cooked poured fondant — sugar, water and a little cream of tartar or corn syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage (238°F), cooled, then worked until it turns opaque and creamy. The stiff rolled fondant sold for covering cakes will not behave the same way when melted.
- Thinning itIf the melted fondant ropes off the fork in a thick blob rather than flowing, add hot water a few drops at a time, or a spoonful of sugar syrup. Too much water and the coating runs off the centre and pools on the paper.
- The overnight rest is not optionalThe overnight rest -- The recipe has the centres stand overnight and be dipped the following day, which lets them firm and dry at the surface so they hold their shape in the warm fondant.
- Coloring on a skewerThe recipe's warning stands: paste or gel color goes in on the tip of a skewer, one touch at a time. Modern gel colors are strong, and a drop straight from the bottle may give a startling pink.
- "Cocoanut"Nineteenth-century spelling for coconut. Use unsweetened shredded coconut here — the sweetened bagged kind is moist and will slacken the fondant it is kneaded into.
- Work dry, and in small batchesFondant picks up moisture from the air, so damp weather makes dipping miserable. Melt only as much as you will use in twenty minutes or so, and stir between dips as instructed to break up the skin that forms on the surface.
Hand-dipped bonbons were popular during the American enthusiasm for home candy-making in the 1890s and 1900s, and Fannie Farmer's confections chapter is built from fondant first, with everything else derived from it. The word bonbon is a reduplication of French bon, "good," of the kind associated with children's speech. In the candy trade of this period the term tended to mean a fondant-coated centre, as distinct from a chocolate-coated one. The recipe itself states that the little curled "tail-piece" was what showed the sweets had been dipped by hand on a fork. Coconut, nut meats and French candied cherries are the three centres this recipe names.