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Chocolate Creams
Prepare Plain Fondant. Divide into three or four partsflavor one with vanilla, another with raspberry and color pink with vegetable coloring. Make peppermints of another portion and add chopped, desiccated cocoanut or nuts to the remainder. Form into small centers and let stand over night to become firm. The next day, melt a pound of "dipping" or "confectioner's chocolate" in a double boiler, adding one-fifth of a bar of cocoa butter. Cool the chocolate, beating frequently, until it is the consistency of Karo. Dip the centers in quickly, using a fork, hatpin, or the hands, and cool on paraffine paper.
This is a dipping recipe rather than a full one: it assumes you already have a batch of plain fondant on hand and knows exactly how difficult the chocolate coating is. The chocolate is where success or failure happens.
- The hinge: temperature, not just consistency"Cool the chocolate, beating frequently" is a description of tempering by hand. Real couverture should be melted to about 115F, then cooled and agitated down to 88-90F for dark chocolate (86-88F for milk) before dipping. Chocolate dipped too warm sets soft, streaked and grey.
- "Consistency of Karo"Karo is corn syrup, so the author means a thick but freely pourable stream off the spoon. It is a useful visual check but no substitute for a thermometer.
- Dipping chocolate and cocoa butter"Dipping" or "confectioner's chocolate" generally meant a chocolate with enough cocoa butter to coat thinly, though the recipe's own addition of cocoa butter suggests the trade product varied. Buy couverture, and skip the added cocoa butter unless your chocolate is stiff. Modern confectionery coating sold as "almond bark" or "candy melts" needs no tempering at all and can simply be melted and used, at the cost of flavour.
- A bar of cocoa butterCocoa butter was sold in pressed bars of varying size, so "one-fifth of a bar" is genuinely ambiguous. Treat it as an ounce or less per pound of chocolate and add it a little at a time.
- Fork, hatpin, or the handsA dipping fork or two-tined chocolate fork works; hatpins leave a hole that has to be closed and are best skipped. Hand-dipping is still used by some confectioners for round centers, but bare hands warm the chocolate quickly, so work in short stretches.
- Paraffine paperThis is wax paper. Parchment or a silicone mat works better and releases cleanly.
- Desiccated cocoanutDesiccated coconut is the modern unsweetened dried flake or fine shred, not the sweetened moist coconut sold for cake. Sweetened coconut will make the centers wet and sticky.
- Overnight standingDo not shorten this. A center that has not dried and firmed will slump off the fork and bleed moisture into the coating, which causes the shell to crack later.
- Room conditions and yieldRoom conditions -- Dip in a cool, dry kitchen; high humidity will dull the finish. The recipe gives no fondant quantity, so yield depends entirely on how large the centers are formed.
Hand-dipped chocolate creams were a mainstay of American home candy-making around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period regularly printed a single plain fondant recipe followed, as here, by instructions for splitting it into vanilla, raspberry, peppermint and nut variations — the same logic as a boxed assortment from a confectioner's shop, made at the kitchen table. The instruction to beat the chocolate while cooling is a working cook's version of tempering, arrived at empirically long before crystal structure was explained; the hatpin, offered casually as a tool, dates the page as firmly as anything in it.