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Decorated Candies and Cakes: Leaves
Leaves and stems may be cut from the green outside portion of a piece of citron and used to connect the flowers, making a graceful design on top and side of the cake. Poinsettias and holly at Christmas, roses, apple blossoms, orange blossoms, pansies, violets, and daffodils are all easily fashioned and most attractive.
Small flowers attached with a bit of frosting to plain mints are beautiful for afternoon teas, or to top a box of bonbons.
Caraway Decorations Candied caraway seeds of different colors, and the very tiny candies known as "hundreds" and "thousands", may be used to make most attractive decorations on candies or cakes. First make foundations of angelica. Cut angelica with a penknife into thin shavings, work with the hands into small balls, then flatten in lozenge shape, about three eighths inch in diameter. This makes a sticky surface. On it arrange a center of yellow or brown caraway candies broken in pieces, or use the "hundreds" and "thousands", putting each candy in place with a small pair of tweezers, or the end of a toothpick dipped in water to make the candies stick to it. Around the center arrange white or yellow caraway candies like the petals of a daisy.
With the very tiny candies, a single yellow candy with five blue or pink candies around makes a forget-me-not. With yellow caraways, sprays of goldenrod or chrysanthemums may be fashioned. After the flowers are made, they may easily be arranged on the soft frosting of a cake, or fastened by means of sugar syrup to a large mint. Arrange leaves and stems to connect the flowers. A basket may be made directly on the soft frosting of a cake in any color desired, having the candies go crosswise as a basket is woven. Leaves and stems may be made of fine strips of citron. The greenest citron that can be purchased and preferably the dark outside should be used. Silver dragees may be used with the flower decoration for conventional designs.
Holly Decorations Small red checkerberry candies may be purchased, the size and color of holly berries. Leaves may be fashioned from ornamental frosting, fondant, or almond paste colored green, or from angelica or citron. Halves of blanched pistachio nuts also make good leaves.
Arrange two or three leaves meeting at the center, place two or more red candies where they join, and a short stem of the same material as that used for the leaves. If the red candies are not obtainable, candied cherries may be cut the shape and size of holly berries, or fondant or almond paste may be colored with scarlet color paste, and shaped in small balls. Large mints, and large and small cakes, decorated with holly make attractive Christmas gifts.
Figure Decorations First lessons in drawing sometimes show the possibilities of straight lines in making figures. These can be reproduced on large mints or little cakes with the lines made with ornamental frosting or melted chocolate, or of narrow strips of angelica, with a round piece of angelica for the head. One line for the back, two for the arms and two for the legs, with a round head, may be put on at many different angels to show a boy walking, running, kneeling, or standing still. With a ball cut from a cherry, the figures can be arranged in the different attitudes of football or baseball players, and are appreciated during the ball playing season. Dancing and skating figures, and many others, can also be portrayed with a few characteristic lines.
This is a decorating method rather than a formula, and almost every material it names has either changed its name or become hard to buy. Sort out the ingredients first and the technique is straightforward.
- AngelicaCandied stems of Angelica archangelica, sold in green batons through the mid-twentieth century and now a specialty import. It is the one material here with no close substitute: the recipe relies on its tacky cut surface to hold small candies without added glue. Thick strips of candied citron peel or green-tinted marzipan will stand in for the shapes, but you will need a dab of royal icing to make things stick.
- CitronCandied peel of the citron fruit, not lemon peel and not the yellow mixed peel sold for fruitcake. The instruction to use "the greenest citron" and the dark outside means the outer rind, which holds more colour; buy whole candied halves rather than diced peel if you want strips long enough for stems.
- Candied caraway seedsThese are comfits, caraway seed pan-coated in coloured sugar. Aniseed comfits and the coloured sugar-shell dragees sold for cake work are the nearest current equivalent. Broken pieces, as directed for the flower centres, give a rougher edge that reads better as a stamen than a whole comfit does.
- Hundreds and thousandsThe British name for opaque round nonpareils, the tiny hard sugar beads. Modern jimmies, the elongated rod sprinkles, will not work for the forget-me-not pattern described, which depends on five round beads sitting flush around a sixth.
- Checkerberry candiesSmall round wintergreen candies, checkerberry being Gaultheria procumbens. Red cinnamon imperials are a workable substitute, close to the right size and colour for holly berries; the flavour is hotter than wintergreen but reads as Christmas in the same way.
- Silver drageesStill sold, but in the United States they carry a food-decoration-only label rather than a food label, and some jurisdictions restrict them outright. Treat them as removable ornament on a gift cake, not as something to be eaten.
- Ornamental frostingRoyal icing: powdered sugar beaten with egg white to a stiff pipeable paste. It is what gives the fine lines called for in the figure decorations, and it dries hard, which matters if the pieces are to be boxed.
- The timing that mattersThe composed flowers go onto frosting that is still soft, and the window is short, boiled icing in particular setting quickly. Build all the flowers on a sheet of parchment first, then ice the cake, then place. Working the other way round leaves you setting tiny candies into a crust.
- HandlingTweezers and a damp toothpick are exactly right, and the damp end should be barely damp; a wet toothpick dissolves the colour off a nonpareil and smears it. Keep hands cool and dry when rolling angelica into balls, or it turns gummy and picks up lint.
Candy and cake decoration of this kind belongs to a period when a home cook could buy at a good grocer a range of confectioner's materials that have since retreated to trade suppliers: candied angelica, whole candied citron, checkerberry lozenges, coloured caraway comfits. The comfits themselves are the oldest thing on the list, made by tumbling a seed in a pan while sugar syrup is added in thin layers, a technique documented in European confectionery from the late medieval period and originally as much medicine as sweet, caraway and aniseed being carminatives taken after meals. "Hundreds and thousands" is the British trade name for nonpareils, which the author brackets in quotation marks. The instructions for figures drawn from a few straight lines, with cherry-ball heads posed as football and baseball players in season, place the book firmly in the era of the afternoon tea and the handmade Christmas gift box, when decorated bonbons and large mints were a plausible present rather than a curiosity.