I'm taking a brief respite from blogging about my internship to post an interlude on candy making. As I posted a couple of years ago, candy making was a long-standing tradition started and kept alive by my grandmother until she died. While we (my mom, sister, and I) did attempt to re-ignite the candy making tradition when the post above was written, we never tried to recreate the hand-dipped chocolates that my grandmother was so famous for (well, famous in her circles; she never had the President or the Pope knocking on her door begging for sweets). For me, it was partly due to knowing the candy would not be just like Gramma's, and partly because I couldn't find a recipe that suited me. I did take another step towards the chocolates when I made peanut butter balls this last Christmas. The filling had to be rolled in small balls and dipped in candy coating, an apprentice training if you will for what my grandmother did.
And then yesterday, I got a bee in my bonnet. I had planned on attempting hand-dipped chocolates for Christmas as well as the peanut butter balls because I finally found a recipe for them that I wanted to try. I had even purchased all the ingredients. However, the experiment didn't even happen because I ran out of time and the weather wasn't right (more on that later). But yesterday the stars came into alignment--no, not really--and I made my very first batch of hand-dipped chocolates. Raspberry ones, that tasted almost just like Gramma's. Here is the basic filling recipe.
What you'll need:
2 1/2 lbs. confectioner's sugar
1 c. sweetened condensed milk (not evaporated)
1 cube softened butter
2 Tbs. flavoring (choose your favorite)
Food coloring (optional)
What you'll need to do:
1. In a large bowl, mix together all of the ingredients. You'll want to act fast (see the tips below), so I recommend using an electric mixer to initially mix everything and finishing with your hands to get the dough to come together.
2. Take a portion of the dough and immediately cover what you don't use. Roll out the portion you have into a log and cut into small same-sized pieces. Roll the pieces into balls, place on a baking sheet covered with wax paper, cover everything with plastic wrap, and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.
3. Remove from fridge and dip in melted chocolate (see tips). Place back on wax paper, put baking sheet(s) on a table or counter top, and let set for a couple of hours or until chocolate is firm before boxing up.
Candy Making Tips
Here's a few things I have learned from my grandmother and from yesterday's experiment:
1. I prefer a mixture of unsweetened and semi-sweet chocolate for dipping. A good ratio is 1 part unsweetened for 2 parts semi-sweet. The candy centers are sweet enough that you don't want to add chocolate containing too much sugar. Choose a brand that you prefer. My grandmother always used Ghirardelli, but yesterday's batch was made with another brand and still tasted quite good.
2. You can microwave the chocolate to melt it! Seriously, you don't need a double-boiler pot. Just put it in a microwave-safe bowl and heat it in 30-second intervals, mixing between intervals until the chocolate is completely melted and combined. You may need to reheat in 30-second intervals as you are dipping (I had to).
3. Do not melt your chocolate or dip your candies on a day of high humidity. This was something my grandmother always told me, and I have memories of her scrambling to get the chocolate made on a sunny November day before the fog and rain returned. I never truly understood this until I saw how the chocolate behaved yesterday. The chocolate takes a long time to set (mine took a couple of hours) and extra humidity in the air will create both a longer setting time and make the chocolate slightly discolored. It behaves completely differently from chocolate candy coating, as the candy coating has additional additives that make it set much faster and I was able to make my peanut butter balls (which use the chocolate candy coating) with cloudy/foggy skies and had no problem.
4. Flavorings can be found at local supermarkets. Mine had the raspberry flavoring I used and a mint one that I also bought and have yet to try. If you use only vanilla for your flavoring, you may want to only use about 1-2 tsp (instead of the listed amount), otherwise the vanilla flavor could be overpowering.
5. Food coloring is a fun addition, especially if you match it with the flavor you use. I used a bit of red food coloring for my raspberry chocolates. If I had made a batch of mint, I would have added green. I would recommend a liquid food coloring rather than a paste-based one (like the types used for cake frosting, for example Wilton). The liquid mixes better with the dough. Also, the color was streaky on my filling until I worked with it and rolled it into balls; then the color became consistent.
6. The dough will dry out fast! That is why you want to cover any portion you are not currently working with. Also, I moistened a paper towel and lightly dampened my hands every so often to keep the moisture from drawing out of the dough as I rolled it. That definitely helped too.
7. Lastly, the filling recipe above will make LOTS of candy. I mean dozens of candies, pounds of candies, millions and billions and trillions of candies. Ok, maybe not that much, but it makes more than can be reasonably eaten by a small group of people. So unless you are giving a lot of it away, use no more than half the recipe. I found this out the hard way. Learn from my mistake.
I have a lot of leftover dough currently double-bagged and in my freezer. I'm attempting to see if I can make the filling ahead of time and still have it taste/feel the way it should when I thaw it out to dip the chocolates. I'll be sure to post the success or failure of that test.
But as for now, I'm enjoying my raspberry chocolates.
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