Home › Candy Making › Cream Candy (To two pounds of sugar add one)
Cream Candy (To two pounds of sugar add one)
To two pounds of sugar, add one pint of water and place over the fire; stir until the sugar is dissolved, no longer. Boil slowly, but steadily, until when a little is dropped from a spoon into water, it can be rolled with the fingers into a very soft ball. For this testing, unless you make the candy very often and so know just how it should look, it is better to use ice water as it gives the result so quickly. Take the saucepan from the fire and with a spoon rub some of the syrup against the side of the pan until it begins to look cloudy. Turn the pan partially round and repeat the rubbing until the whole quantity is cloudy and thick. Flavor and pour into a lightly greased pan; spread it evenly with a knife and when cold cut into bars. Cream cocoanut candy may be made in the same way, adding one freshly grated cocoanut to the above amount as soon as the sugar is dissolved.
This is fondant by another name: a plain sugar syrup boiled to soft-ball and then deliberately crystallised by friction. The whole thing turns on two moments, the temperature you stop boiling at and how you handle the syrup afterwards.
- The hinge: stir only until dissolvedOnce the sugar is in solution, put the spoon down. Any agitation, or a single stray crystal from the side of the pan, will seed the syrup early and give you a coarse, gritty candy. Wash the pan sides down with a wet pastry brush and let it boil undisturbed.
- Soft-ball in numbersThe cold-water test corresponds roughly to 235-240F on a candy thermometer, and the 'very soft ball' the recipe asks for sits at the lower end of that. Under it the bars will not set; much over and the candy comes out hard rather than creamy.
- QuantitiesTwo pounds of granulated sugar is about 4 1/2 cups; a pint of water is 2 cups. Use a heavy saucepan of at least 3 quarts, since the syrup climbs as it boils.
- Let it cool before creamingModern fondant practice is to let the syrup drop to roughly 110-115F before working it. Rubbing it while it is still near boiling, as written, will work but tends to give a grainier crumb; cooling first produces the fine, opaque cream the recipe is after.
- "Cloudy and thick" is the finish lineThe change happens fast once it starts. Have the greased pan and the knife ready before you begin rubbing, because the mass stiffens quickly after turning white and will not spread once it sets.
- FlavoringAdd extracts off the heat, at the point the recipe says: vanilla, lemon, or peppermint, on the order of a teaspoon for this quantity. Extracts added to boiling syrup lose much of their aroma.
- Fresh coconutOne coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated. Unsweetened desiccated coconut can be substituted, using rather less by volume, and being dry it will take up moisture from the syrup.
- YieldAbout 2 pounds of candy. Kept tightly covered in a tin it holds well, and dries out if left open.
Cream candy of this sort is simply fondant made at the kitchen stove rather than in a confectioner's shop, and it was the foundation of American home candy making at the turn of the twentieth century. The technique the recipe describes, rubbing the cooled syrup against the pan until it clouds, is mechanical crystallisation: friction throws down countless tiny sugar crystals at once instead of a few large ones, which is what separates smooth cream from grainy sugar. Professional confectioners of the period did the same thing on a marble slab with a steel scraper, and the pan-and-spoon method here is the domestic shortcut. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s commonly, though not invariably, placed candy making in its own chapter.