Skip to main content
Dessert

Cocoanut-cream Candy

A sweet confection made by boiling sugar with water and cream of tartar, then adding coconut and dropping onto paper to cool.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cocoanut-cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar, water, and cream of tartar.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

Add coconut and shape

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the coconut.

  2. Drop spoonfuls onto white paper to cool.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + coconuttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,223 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Sweetens the candy and, once boiled, sets into a firm, sweet structure.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps keep the sugar syrup smooth by discouraging large crystals.
Coconut
Adds chewy texture and coconut flavour to the candy.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar, and the length of boiling determines how firm the candy sets as it cools. Boiling too briefly leaves it soft and sticky, while boiling too long makes it hard and brittle.

Swap the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes