Home › Candy Making › Chocolate Creams
Chocolate Creams
Take two cupfuls of granulated sugar, one-half cupful of cream; boil just five minutes; take from the fire and flavor with very little vanilla and stir until it is stiff. Butter the fingers slightly, work the candy into little balls and lay on buttered plates until cold; in the meantime have half cake of chocolate broken in small pieces in a bowl. Put the bowl over the tea kettle to melt; when melted, take the balls, with a hat pin and roll them in the chocolate and return to the plates to harden.
A two-ingredient fondant centre, hand-rolled and hand-dipped. Everything depends on how far the sugar and cream are cooked, and the original gives a time rather than a temperature.
- Five minutes means the soft-ball stageFive minutes is roughly the soft-ball stage -- boiled steadily, two cups of sugar with half a cup of cream will usually come to somewhere near soft-ball, which is what makes the mass stiffen when stirred. Pan width, heat and altitude all shift that, so go by a thermometer rather than the clock: much below 234F the balls will not hold their shape, much above 245F they turn grainy and crumbly.
- Stir only after it cools slightlyBeating the syrup the moment it leaves the heat gives coarse crystals. Let it stand a few minutes until the bottom of the pan is warm rather than hot, then stir steadily until it loses its gloss and thickens; that is what produces the fine-grained fondant texture.
- Cream, not milkPeriod "cream" varied a good deal in richness, but modern heavy cream is the nearest common equivalent. Half-and-half or milk will work but sets softer and stickier, and the centres will slump when dipped.
- Half a cake of chocolateBaking chocolate was commonly sold in cakes of about half a pound, so half a cake is likely somewhere around 4 oz, though cake sizes varied. If it was unsweetened, as baking chocolate usually was, that suits these very sweet centres; semisweet or dark couverture will make the finished cream sweeter overall.
- Over the tea kettleThat is a double boiler by another name, steam from the kettle warming the bowl. Any bowl set over barely simmering water does the same. Keep water and steam out of the chocolate itself, which is what makes it seize, and keep the heat gentle -- much above 120F and it will scorch and thicken.
- Tempering, if you want a snapChocolate simply melted and cooled will set soft and streaky. To get a firm, glossy shell, melt to about 115F, cool to 82F while stirring, then rewarm to 88-90F for dipping. Untempered coating still tastes right; it just needs to be kept cool and eaten sooner.
- The hat pinA dipping fork, a bamboo skewer or two forks used together do the job now. Chill the centres firm first, dip quickly, and let the excess drip before setting them on parchment rather than a buttered plate.
- YieldSeveral dozen small balls, depending on how large you roll them. They keep about a week in a cool room in a single layer; refrigeration makes them sweat once brought back to room temperature.
Chocolate creams belong to the great late-nineteenth-century vogue for home candy making, which followed cheap granulated sugar and, above all, packaged eating and baking chocolate sold in standard cakes. Before that, dipped confections were the work of professional confectioners; by the 1890s books like this one gave space to candy. The two-part structure here — a boiled cream centre inside a shell of melted chocolate — is exactly how commercial cream centres were made, and the improvised tools — the tea kettle for a double boiler, a hat pin for a dipping fork — mark it as a domestic imitation of trade practice rather than an old family sweet.