Home › Unusual Recipes › Peppermint and Wintergreen Wafers
Peppermint and Wintergreen Wafers
Prepare Plain Fondant, coloring part pink, and flavoring it with a few drops oil of wintergreen; leave the remainder white, but flavor it with a few drops oil of peppermint. Warm, put on a board over which a little confectioner's sugar has been sifted, roll quickly to one-fourth inch thickness and cut into rounds with a large thimble, or small cutter. Dust with confectioner's sugar and let stand a few hours to become firm.
A fondant mint, and the whole recipe hinges on two things the original assumes you already know: how to make plain fondant, and how strong flavoring oils are. Everything else is rolling and drying.
- You need the fondant recipe firstThis entry is a variation, not a complete formula. Plain fondant is sugar and water (with a pinch of cream of tartar or a spoon of corn syrup as the interfering agent) boiled to 238-240F, poured onto a cool surface, left undisturbed until lukewarm, then worked with a scraper until it clouds and turns white and creamy. Let it ripen an hour or more before using.
- Oils, not extractsOil of peppermint and oil of wintergreen are the essential oils, several times stronger than the alcohol extracts sold in the baking aisle. "A few drops" is meant literally, and the oils are best added from a toothpick rather than poured. Buy oils labelled for candy making; alcohol extracts taste weak by comparison.
- A note on wintergreenNatural oil of wintergreen is methyl salicylate, and undiluted it is genuinely potent stuff — a teaspoon is far beyond any culinary dose. Use only a food-grade candy flavoring, keep the bottle away from children, and do not improvise upward from "a few drops."
- Warming means barely warmingSet the fondant in a bowl over hot, not boiling, water and work it until it is pliable and just above body temperature. Overheat it and the sugar recrystallises coarse and the wafers dry gritty.
- Why "roll quickly"Warm fondant stiffens as it cools and cracks rather than rolls. Work in small batches, keep the rest of the mass covered over the hot water, and re-warm scraps before rerolling.
- The thimbleA large sewing thimble cuts a round of about five-eighths of an inch — the small after-dinner mint size. Any 5/8 to 1 inch cutter, or the wide end of a piping tip, does the same job.
- Drying and storingA few hours uncovered in a dry room sets a firm crust while the centre stays soft; a humid kitchen can take overnight. Store in a tin between sheets of waxed paper, not airtight with anything moist, or they will weep.
Fondant reached American household cookbooks in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when cheap refined sugar put French confectioners' technique within reach of a home kitchen, and books of this era treat it as a base paste to be flavored, tinted and shaped a dozen ways — this page is one of those variations. Small flavored wafers like these were the pastel "after-dinner mints" passed with coffee at the close of a formal meal, where peppermint carried a plain digestive reputation and wintergreen, the North American answer to it, is here tinted pink so the two could be told apart on the dish. Wintergreen's flavor comes from methyl salicylate, distilled commercially from Gaultheria procumbens and later from sweet birch before synthetic production took over, a compound closely akin to aspirin.