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Cream Mints
Melt fondant over hot water, flavor with a few drops of oil of peppermint, wintergreen, clove, cinnamon, or orange, and color if desired. Drop from tip of spoon on oiled paper. Confectioners use rubber moulds for shaping cream mints; but these are expensive for home use, unless one is to make mints in large quantities.
A two-line recipe that depends almost entirely on one thing: how hot you let the fondant get. Everything else is flavoring and patience.
- The hinge: gentle heat onlyFondant melted much above about 150F loses its fine crystal structure and sets grainy, dull, or hard. Use a bowl over barely steaming water, stir until it is just fluid enough to drop, and take it off the heat while it still looks thick. If it stiffens as you work, return it to the water for a few seconds rather than adding heat from below.
- FondantThe book assumes you have made basic fondant from an earlier page in the Confections chapter — sugar and water boiled to the soft-ball stage (about 238F), cooled undisturbed, then worked until white and creamy. Commercial rolled fondant sold for cake covering is a different product with glycerine and gums in it, and will not behave the same. Look for prepared candy or poured fondant if you are not making your own.
- A few drops means a few dropsOil of peppermint, wintergreen, clove and cinnamon are essential oils, far stronger than the alcohol-based extracts on most spice shelves. Two or three drops flavors a cup of fondant; clove and cinnamon oils in particular can taste medicinal in excess. Add with a toothpick if you want control, and note that extract, if substituted, will need considerably more and adds water that thins the fondant.
- ColoringGel or paste colors are preferable to liquid, which slackens the mixture. Coloring each flavor differently is a useful way to tell a tray of mints apart, though the recipe itself specifies nothing beyond "color if desired."
- Oiled paperParchment or a silicone mat replaces it entirely, and needs no greasing. Waxed paper works if the fondant is not too warm.
- DroppingWork quickly and keep the drops small, a scant teaspoon each; they spread into rounds as they settle. A disposable piping bag or a small squeeze bottle gives more even results than a spoon and is the practical modern answer to the rubber moulds Farmer mentions.
- Setting and yieldLeave them at cool room temperature for an hour or two until firm and dry to the touch, then lift with a thin spatula. One cup of fondant makes roughly 40 to 50 small mints. Store between layers of parchment in a tin; refrigeration makes them sweat.
Cream mints belong to the after-dinner tradition of the late nineteenth-century American table, when a dish of small flavored fondant drops was passed with coffee. Fondant itself — sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage and then agitated so it crystallizes fine and white — was the foundation of the whole home confectionery chapter in books like this one, since a single batch could be flavored, colored, molded, or used to center a chocolate. Farmer's aside about rubber moulds is a glimpse of the professional trade: commercial confectioners deposited fondant into rubber moulds to get uniform mints, a piece of equipment she judged not worth the outlay unless one was making candy in large quantities.