The encyclopædia of practical cookery

and bake in not too hot an oven. Should the sweetmeats not be coloured enough, colour them darker with a little sal-ammoniac. Chocolate Syrup.— (1) Mix up Jib. of scraped best Chocolate cake with lqt. of water, add 41b. of loaf sugar, and stir over a slow fire until the Chocolate is dissolved and the sugar syruped. Very useful to the pastrycook and confectioner. (2) Rub down to a coarse powder 2oz. of the bark of roasted cacao-beans, and mix with 2oz. of simple syrup ; boil this in 1 pint of syrup made by dissolving 12oz. of sugar in J pint of water, and after an-hour-and-a-half’s gentle simmering, strain through a flannel bag, and add 2 drachms of extract of vanilla. Chocolate Tablets. — Boil 71b. of loaf sugar, 1 teaspoonful of cream of tartar, and 3 pints of water in a sugar-boiler for ten minutes ; then add lib. of warmed butter, let the mixture froth up, boil to a weak crack (or 5deg. less than the crack), pour it out on to an oiled slab, and cover over with Jib. of powdered Chocolate. Work this well in, kneading the mass as if it were dough, pull it again and again over a hook fixed in the wall, return it to the slab, work it into ropes or flat ribands, let it cool, mark it into tablet shapes or squares, break it up at the indentations when cold, and pack away in boxes for future use. Chocolate Tart. — Prepare 1 breakfast-cupful of Chocolate and stir in a couple of well-beaten eggs. Line a pie-dish with a very thin layer of puff paste, pour in the mixture, place it in the oven, and let it set quite firm. Have ready Jib. of cooking' apples, peeled, cored, sliced, and stewed tender (or use tinned apples), put them on top of the Chocolate, cover over with cream, and dust over with 1 table-spoonful of caster sugar; cover over the tart with more paste, glaze the surface with egg, and bake in a moderate oven. Chocolate- and. Vanilla-cream Bonbons. — Soak 2oz. of the finest picked gum arabic in J pint of hot water, squeeze it through muslin, flavour with a few drops of essence of vanilla, and put in as much caster sugar as it will absorb, working the whole into a rather stiff, smooth paste. Melt 4oz. of Chocolate with 1 table- spoonful of water, standing it in the oven until it is quite dissolved, and then beat in with a spoon the whites of two eg’gs. Have ready a biscuitforcer, with a Jin. tube at the end of it, fill it with the gum preparation, and push it out upon a large sheet of paper well sifted over with fine sugar ; as the cream is forced out, cut it off in pieces from the mouth of the forcer with a knife, so that each shall be about the size of small filbert-kernels ; when the paper is full of these drops, put it on a bakingsheet, and set this in the screen for ten minutes. Take one at a time of these drops on the tip of a fork and dip into the Chocolate icing, then set them on a fine wire tray, and put in the screen for ten minutes. When quite hard and set, put them between sheets of paper in a box.