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Decorated Candies and Cakes: Mints
Decorated Peppermint Bars Make After Dinner Mints, shaping the candy, when pulled, in bars four inches long and one inch wide. Let stand in powdered sugar until sugary, then decorate with a spray of roses or sweet peas made of ornamental frosting. Decorated Mints Make Plain White Mints, one and one half inches in diameter, and decorate with a single violet, forget-me-not, tiny rose, or holly berries and leaves made of ornamental frosting.
Decorated Marshmallows Dip marshmallows in melted fondant, and decorate with tiny flowers made of ornamental frosting in different colors.
Edible Place Cards Make Wintergreen Wafer mixture, roll thin, and cut in pieces two by three inches. Put ornamental frosting in stem tube, and write the name of each guest in the center of a card. Use at a children's party.
Marshmallow Baskets Dip marshmallows in fondant, and when firm insert a piece of fine wire to make a handle. Fill stem tubes with ornamental frosting of different colors. Make a lattice work of frosting on the sides of the marshmallow, and cover the handle with frosting. Decorate with tiny stems and blossoms of contrasting colors, to make it look like a basket of flowers.
Orange Butter Frosting 1/3 cup butter 4 tablespoons orange juice 1 cup powdered sugar 1 teaspoon grated orange rind Mix orange juice and rind, let stand half an hour, and strain through cheesecloth. Cream butter in a warm but not hot bowl. Add sugar gradually, and beat until light. Let orange juice get slightly warm, and add drop by drop to first mixture. This may be used for frosting candies or large or small cakes. Portions may be colored, and used through paper frosting bags for decorations. Keep in a cool place until needed.
Japanese Frosting 1/4 cup butter Whites 2 eggs Sifted confectioners' sugar Flavoring Color paste Cream butter, and add gradually half a cup of confectioners' sugar, beating constantly. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, and gradually beat in one cup of sugar. Combine mixtures, and add enough more sugar to make frosting stiff enough to hold its shape. Color and flavor as desired, and with paper tubes use to ornament candies or cakes. Keep in a cool place, that it may remain firm.
These are finishing instructions rather than standalone recipes: they assume you already have fondant, pulled mints and wintergreen wafers from elsewhere in the book, and that you own a set of small metal decorating tubes. Two of the frostings here are built on uncooked egg white, which is where the trouble lies.
- Why the cautionJapanese Frosting is raw egg white and butter, beaten with sugar and then held at room temperature or in a cool larder for hours while decorating proceeds. Nothing in it ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and it is piped onto candies that will be eaten by children at a party. The "ornamental frosting" called for throughout these decorating notes is a recipe given elsewhere in the book; in this period it was usually uncooked egg white beaten with confectioners' sugar, so the same caution is likely to apply. Use a current recipe, either pasteurised egg white or meringue powder, if you want to pipe these designs.
- The wire handlesMarshmallow Baskets call for a piece of fine wire pushed into the candy and coated with frosting. A concealed wire in a soft sweet handed to a child is a swallowing and puncture hazard, and it is not visible once the lattice work goes on. This detail should simply be dropped.
- Stem tube and paper tubeA "stem tube" is a fine round writing tip, of the sort used for lettering and stems. The "paper frosting bags" are cones rolled from parchment or greaseproof paper, still a neat way to pipe two or three colours at once without washing a bag between them.
- Fondant for dippingThe melted fondant meant here is cooked sugar fondant, thinned over hot water and kept only just warm enough to flow. Overheated fondant loses gloss and can set grainy, and a very hot dip will soften the surface of a marshmallow rather than coat it cleanly.
- Orange Butter Frosting proportionsOne cup of powdered sugar to a third of a cup of butter plus four tablespoons of juice is a slack mixture by modern standards, though the recipe expects it to hold up well enough to go through a paper bag. Adding the liquid drop by drop into creamed butter, as directed, is what keeps it from separating; the "warm but not hot bowl" means barely warm to the hand.
- Sizes and yieldNo yields are given anywhere on the page. Peppermint bars at four inches by one inch are considerably larger than a modern after-dinner mint.
- Letting mints "stand in powdered sugar until sugary"This is deliberate crystallisation, not drying out. The recipe gives no time, only the signal: left buried in sugar until the surface has gone sugary, pulled mints develop the short, crumbly interior that makes them dissolve on the tongue.
Decorated mints, marshmallow baskets and edible place cards belong to a specific moment in American entertaining, roughly 1890 to 1920, when the home-made favour at each place setting was the mark of a considered table and confectionery had become a domestic accomplishment rather than a shop purchase. The Candy Cook Book sits in the tradition of the Boston cooking-school authors — standard household measures, small numbered tubes, a chapter on decoration treated as seriously as one on boiling sugar. Pulled cream mints were a staple of nineteenth-century American confectioners. Place cards written in icing point to the other thing these books were selling: not just candy, but the apparatus of a party at which a hostess without professional help could still produce something ornamental.