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Dessert

Chocolate Cream Candy

Chocolate cream candy is a sweet made from a vanilla chocolate base, powdered sugar, water, cornstarch, butter, and vanilla, coated in melted chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 242 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chocolate Cream Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Wash the butter to remove all salt grains.

  2. Stir together the powdered sugar and water, then mix in the cornstarch and bring to a boil, stirring constantly for about 10 minutes.

  3. Add the butter and beat the mixture until it resembles granulated cream.

  4. Stir in the vanilla.

  5. Butter your hands and form the cream into balls the size of large marbles, placing them on a greased dish.

Coat and dry

  1. Melt the vanilla chocolate by placing grated chocolate in a tin pail or saucepan and submerging it in boiling water until it becomes a black syrup.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar to the melted chocolate and beat until smooth.

  3. Roll the cream balls in the chocolate until well coated and place them on a cold dish to dry, ensuring they do not touch each other.

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 + arrowroottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together242 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Vanilla + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Vanilla and sugar 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

Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the sweet base of the cream.
Cornstarch or arrowroot
Thickens the boiled syrup so the cream holds its shape when formed into balls.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, softening the cream's texture.
Vanilla chocolate
Forms the coating that gives the candies their outer shell and flavor.

The step that matters

Boiling the cornstarch mixture. Cornstarch thickens only when it reaches a boil and is stirred constantly; stopping early leaves a runny cream that will not hold its shape, and stirring too little can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against vanilla, chocolate, sugar, butter. 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.

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