Skip to main content
Dessert

Chocolate Creams

Chocolate Creams are small chocolate‑coated balls made from beaten egg white, sugar, vanilla, and confectioner’s sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Vanilla and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,020 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Chocolate Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Make the centers

  1. Beat the egg white until light.

  2. Add the sugar and vanilla extract.

  3. Mix in enough confectioner's sugar to form a stiff mixture.

  4. Roll the mixture into balls the size of small marbles.

  5. Place the balls on a pan to firm up.

Coat and finish

  1. Cover the balls with chocolate coating.

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. Vanilla + chocolatetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Whips to a light foam and, with the sugar, gives the centers their soft, airy body.
Confectioner's sugar
Stiffens the whipped mixture so it can be rolled into balls that hold their shape.
Chocolate coating
Forms the outer shell that covers and encloses each center.

The step that matters

Mixing in the confectioner's sugar. Adding sugar gradually until the mixture is stiff controls the texture. Too little leaves the centers soft and sticky, while too much makes them dry and crumbly.

“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