These were hugely popular with everyone who received them. How could they not be, looking that adorably festive on a cookie tray? Everyone wanted to know what they were, and thanks to Yard’s engaging storytelling in her second book, I had details to give them on their Italian origins.

They’re very pretty, of course, but they taste much more sophisticated than you might expect. It helped that I used a couple of aging bars of very dark Michel Cluizel (my absolute favorite chocolatier in the world) chocolate in the glaze, but the cake’s sweetness and almond flavor are very light and subtle. It was only when I tasted one that I realized there was no almond flavoring in the recipe, only almond paste and almond flour, and I think from the photo in the book I was expecting something with the concentrated flavor of the extract.

The only other modification I did to the recipe was to add apricot brandy to the simple syrup I soaked the cake layers with. In my opinion, that was an Incredibly Good Call, and I would even add a little more next time. The whole effect of the “cookie” was good, but the almond cake needed something extra to stand up well against the chocolate glaze. That could’ve been the due to the chocolate I used, but I wouldn’t want to use anything less potent in the future.

I’ll definitely make these again–I’ll probably have to, considering how much everyone liked them. Next year, though, I’ll cut them in smaller pieces. Mine were pretty small, but I found these were best one bite at a time, and more than once I noticed people wanting to split one.

My best friend loves unicorns, and when I was going through my cookie cutters, I found a unicorn one. After my success with the Dala horses, I wanted to try one in a similar style. There’s another photo of him here.

(It seems like an odd connection, and it was to me in the making of it, but I just remembered that the unicorn was a symbol for Christ in the Middle Ages, so it’s not as incongruous as I thought.)

The more ornaments I decorated, the more they started to look like hot air balloons. I think that will be one of my next cookie cutter shapes.

Last time on As the Fondant Liquefies, we made cherry-flavored fondant and dipped maraschino cherries in it, in preparation for dipping them in chocolate. Really, that’s the hardest part of the whole process.

I decided to make another batch of cherries after the ones I documented in the original post and test the theory the Geeky Gnu and I had about pulling the hot fondant from the start instead of trying to cool it with a scraper on my small piece of marble. That and I wanted to prove I could do it all by myself. It worked very well, actually. After awhile, I got into a rhythm where I was kneading it like a cat, pressing half the mass of hot sugar down on the Silpat-covered marble with one hand and then the other half with the other, stretching it as high as I could each time. The fondant seemed to turn out much better–and crystallize much faster–this way.


Here’s what it looked like when I managed to pull it away from my fingers and deposit it in a bowl:

After that, it’s just a matter of covering the cherries in chocolate. I found that holding the stem and dragging the cherry from side to side once or twice, letting the chocolate come right up to the stem, coated them nicely. Then I pulled them up, let a little of the chocolate drip off, and touched the bottom of the cherry to the surface of the chocolate once or twice to encourage more of the excess chocolate to stay behind. Once I was satisfied that there wasn’t enough chocolate to form a gigantic foot around the bottom on the tray, I set the cherry on one of the discs I piped beforehand and left it to set up.

As for storing the cherries, if you don’t have a baker’s rack and zillions of sheet pans in your kitchen (someday, someday….), I recommend hitting up your friendly neighborhood pizza joint and asking very, very nicely for a few unused boxes. (Leave a generous tip in exchange, so they’ll be open to doing it again!) Mr. Gnu was kind enough to stop at Pagliacci’s on the way over and pick up ten extra large ones (we didn’t need that many, but I know they will get used in the future since I already am temporarily storing coconut macaroons in one, and I’ve used them to dry royal icing flowers in the past). Line the box with parchment or wax paper to protect the box from leaking cherries, and you’ll be able to reuse it.

If you use invertase in your fondant (see the first cherry post for more info on that), the cherries will need to sit out at room temperature for three to four days before they will be completely liquefied. If you don’t have invertase, the cherries will take up to two weeks to liquefy, which means you have to plan ahead. Invertase is easily purchased online and inexpensive, although I now have a larger quantity of it living in my fridge than I’ll use in my lifetime.

In the end, the cherries were a huge hit with everyone we gave them to. I wrapped two packages together for each family and couple in clear-topped plastic containers, one of cookies and one with chocolate-covered cherries and rainbow cookies. More than once, the person opening the present handed the cookies to the other recipient and hid the cherries for themselves! I think the best part about them is that they aren’t hard to make, but enough delicious ingredients and extremely pleasant work go into them that they truly feel like you’ve made them with love, which I know I did.

Early in the month, I had some friends over to make Christmas cookies with me, and I tested out the sugar cookie recipe in Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking. I loved the recipe–I’ve loved every recipe I’ve tried out of her books–other than having to learn the hard way that the dough really does need to be quite frozen through the whole process of cutting out the shapes. They kept their shape beautifully, held together after they cooled, and tasted wonderful, buttery with the perfect sugar cookie texture.

Inspired by my favorite store-bought sugar cookies–made by Little Rae’s Bakery here in Seattle–I mixed up icing made from powdered sugar and lime juice (yum, though I had to make some with lemon juice for Mr. Bee because wives sometimes cave in like that) and pressed them into a bowl of sanding sugar. They captured the crunch of the sugar on Little Rae’s cookies, which is what I love so much about them. The only thing I really needed to change was to make the cookies thicker, so I decided to use that recipe for my cookies later in the month.

When my mom and my sister-in-law came over to bake cookies, I made a triple batch of the cookie dough and rolled it out extra thick, only making about three half sheet pan-sized sheets with all of that dough. It worked just as well thick as it had thin, and I froze all of my trees and reindeer, angels and ornaments to be frosted later on in the season.

Along came the great snow day that went on…and on…and on, until the day had become a week and we still hadn’t left the house. With Baker Bee home, it was both hard to get things done and very easy to while away the hours baking and taking pictures of the results. Still, by the morning of Christmas Eve, I hadn’t frosted the cookies. I had, fortunately, taken them out of the freezer a day or two before, but that’s as far as I’d gotten. I’d had grand visions of whipping up royal icing and piping the heck out of those cookies. You know, proving that I still knew my way around a star tip and so on. But time? Not on my side, at all.

I’d signed up for Food Buzz a couple days before, and there I ran into a tutorial on cookie decorating with glacé icing posted at Our Best Bites. Her cookies looked absolutely beautiful, jewel-like with their colors and sheen, and having the icing actually taste good sounded like a strong point in the favor of glacé over royal, since her recipe was very similar to what I’d done before, only heavier on the dairy than the flavoring, rather than the other way around, and containing corn syrup, which I’d forgotten was a good thing to include.

Still, I felt a little…well, like I was approaching the half-assedness I had set out to avoid in the first place. I was supposed to be spending hours and hours aggravating my poor sore wrist and shoulder with the piping. And the last time I’d tried to decorate cookies with this kind of icing in multiple colors…it hadn’t gone well. I remember thinking that those were some ugly Thanksgiving Day turkeys to be putting out on a restaurant buffet.

But there was the time thing, and the snow-exhaustion/cabin fever to account for, and I mixed my powdered sugar and corn syrup and milk together, adding a splash each of lemon and orange extracts. I ended up adding some real lemon juice later, to give the icing more of the bite I enjoyed in the previous cookies I iced, and next time I think I’d try replacing some of the milk with lemon juice, but the cookies really did taste fantastic.

As for the looks? Well, I was worse than a narcissist in that proverbial mirror factory. I love the way this icing looks–how the colors swirl and meld together, how bright the colors stay, how it just shines. And even a week later the icing still isn’t hard as a rock like royal icing. (I know this from just having consumed the final cookie left of the batch before starting this post. For inspiration, of course.) I think I like them better than the fanciest cookies I’ve ever piped. They’re much more elegant.

My only complaint is that the shine does dull a bit after the first twenty-four hours, and the edges of the colors seemed to blur just a little, tiny bit over the past week. Of course, that just means they have to be made soon before they’re served or given as gifts. And if I make them too early and they start to dull, then I’ll just have to eat them myself and start from scratch.

As I was dipping a second round of cherries yesterday, I had three lose their stems and become “test cherries” or, in other words, the cherries I get to eat before they’re ready without feeling guilty for wasting one I could be giving to someone else, or at least eating in its final form. (Of course, I have cherries from last Wednesday that are already liquefied, but I have to do quality control on every batch, you know.)

In the interest of tracking how quickly the invertase liquefies the fondant, I decided to dissect and photograph them before taste testing each day.

After (not quite) twenty-four hours, the invertase and cherry juice have converted the fondant immediately around the cherry to liquid, but most of the fondant is still firm and attached to the chocolate coating.

Heading into my senior year in college, my mom and I realized that I was going to most likely be moving not just across town but out of town after graduation and my wedding the next summer, ending the days of having just a short trip on the freeway between us. I’d been getting more and more interested in cooking since the trip we took together to Turkey two years before that, and we both wanted to learn to decorate cakes, so we ended up enrolling in the beginning Wilton classes. And so I started down the path toward pastry school, elbow-deep in Crisco-based frosting in the back room of the local gigantic craft store.

I’m not entirely sure what prompted it, but that Christmas I became obsessed with making fancy little candies for everyone’s presents. Most of them are not so fancy in retrospect, utilizing grocery store coating chocolate and far too much sugar, but then and now the crown jewel of it all was the chocolate-covered cherry. I actually used real chocolate to coat those. I didn’t know anything about tempering chocolate then, so they were soon covered in blooming cocoa butter (not that I even knew that was the problem), but they still tasted delicious. Ever year since, I’ve intended to make them again–and make them right this time, with tempered chocolate and invertase (the enzyme used in commercial cherries to make the centers liquefy)–but even when I’ve acquired the required cherries, they haven’t gotten made.

This year, things were going to be different. This year I lined up a cherry-candying buddy, sort of like a workout buddy but more fattening. Geeky Gnu and I made plans to get together and make them as soon as the invertase showed up. We had to wait a bit longer than we liked on account of the fact that Chef Rubber was waiting for the invertase to be made, but it finally showed up on Tuesday. I was feeling lazy earlier in the week, but fortunately I was talked into making the cherries on Wednesday night rather than Thursday night, which was good because the difference between the two was seven inches of snow.

Part of doing things right this time was finding a recipe that called specifically for the invertase, rather than just adding a few drops of the stuff to the one from Woman’s Day I’d gotten off of the internet all those years ago. I found some hopeful-looking info by searching eGullet, but as of Wednesday afternoon I still didn’t have a recipe in hand. I was wandering through Barnes and Noble, picking up a couple of presents I’d waited too long to order off of Amazon, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the book I’ve been looking for all my life, standing there on B&N’s prominent cookbook display: Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner.

It had a recipe for fondant–the confectioner’s sort, not the kind you peel off of wedding cakes before eating them. It had a full explanation of invertase and how to use it. It had all sorts of technical information about chocolate and sugar I didn’t have memorized yet.

It came home with me. I couldn’t resist.

After a quick perusal of the pertinent pages, I drained the cherries, reserving the juice, and set about lining them up to dry on cooling racks padded with a double layer of paper towel to absorb the juice. A lot of recipes recommend doing this the night before, but we had to be somewhat flexible dependent on the weather.

A couple quick facts for calculating recipe size:
- Average number of cherries per 36 oz. jar (Star brand, from a two-pack bought at Costco): 73.25
- Average number of wasted cherries per a jar due to missing stems: 6

Once Geeky showed up, we started in on a half batch of the fondant recipe in my beautiful shiny new book. The general idea is to take five parts sugar, one part glucose syrup, and one part water and bring them to a boil while stirring constantly. Since I was approaching this whole fondant thing with a teensy-weensy bit too much confidence, I figured I’d go right ahead and substitute the cherry juice for the water in the recipe without bothering to do any boring math to keep the ratio of sugar and water in line. Whether or not this contributed to some of our later troubles, I can’t say. I can say with certainty that it turned the fondant a fairy-tale shade of pink that made the dipped cherries look like a smooth, shimmery bonbon out of a computer-generated cartoon. There’s a certain magic to dipping these cherries that makes you not care about the evils of artificial redness.

Once the syrup is boiling, we quit stirring (okay, maybe there was a little forgetfulness in play here and it took awhile before we figured out we were supposed to stop) and cooked the syrup to 243° F (it may have gotten a little higher than that before we got it out of the pot).


Next, we poured it out onto my woefully small marble slab. The directions say to sprinkle cold water on the marble first and then also on top of the sugar; we managed to sprinkle it on top of the sugar, which started spilling toward the edge of the too-small marble due to the fact that I set it down on the one part of our counter that our discount granite guys didn’t install anywhere near level.

The action didn’t stop once we had that under control. We let the sugar cool to 120° F, more or less, and then began the process of agitating it into crystallizing by scraping it back and forth on the marble, much like one would do with chocolate only much, much more of a pain since chocolate flows and sugar sticks and holds on like the marble is the last life preserver on the Titanic. This required a lot more strength than I was anticipating, so I mostly tried to hold the marble in place and scrape the sugar off the main scraper with a metal bench scraper.

The book says this step should take twenty (very long) minutes for the fondant to fully crystallize, “turning into a short-textured mass.” Twenty minutes came and went without the fondant changing from its consistency of a very gooey, sticky cousin of pulled sugar, even as it became tougher and tougher to scrape.

Finally, we resorted to scraping it entirely off the marble and pulling it like it actually was pulled sugar. This helped…to a point. We never got that short-textured mass, but after awhile it did take on more of a…well, I wouldn’t say it got any less shiny, but the inside of the mass looked more and more matte somehow, and thus seemed to be fairly well crystallized.


The next step in the directions is to allow the fondant to rest overnight, but we didn’t have overnight, so we went straight to dipping the cherries.

To coat the cherries, we heated the fondant over a water bath to 160° F, thinned it a little with some more of the cherry juice (the recipe suggests brandy), and added 1/4 tsp of invertase just before dipping.

Once all of that was accomplished, the dipping went very easily. Keeping the bowl over the water bath (with the gas turned down to the lowest setting) kept the fondant thin enough to coat the cherries without too much trouble. As each one was coated, we let them drip over the bowl, removed the extra fondant hanging from the bottom with the edge of a wooden spoon, and set them to cool on a sheet pan covered with a Silpat.


I don’t think anyone who was there could get over how pretty they looked. I really wanted to leave them like that…only the invertase would have left all of that shiny pink sugar in a puddle around the cherry after a day or two. We did give into temptation and try a couple of misshapen and stemless cherries that way, though, and as pretty as the pink ones are, they’re much better with the chocolate. So that makes up for having to cover up the sugar coating.

One thing we didn’t learn until later was that it’s better not to let the fondant coat the stem as well as the cherry. Coating the stem gives the invertase-laced fondant an express lane to the open air, along which it can ooze out and drip all over the chocolate.


Because we only made a half batch of the fondant–enough for about a quarter of the cherries I had drained and dried for us–I made some of the home-style “fondant” I had used the first time I made the cherries and had a couple of helpers cover them with me while Geeky dipped the other cherries in the real fondant. The recipe itself is very straightforward and my only addition to it was 1/2 tsp of invertase, so I won’t get into detail on that, but I have a tip or two about how to get it onto the cherries in a smooth and even fashion.

The main trick is to dust your hands/latex gloves with enough powdered sugar that the “fondant” remains dry as you roll. Also, using a smaller piece than you think you need to cover the cherry and squishing it to fit helps avoid making big, clunky-looking cherries. Once you have the cherry covered, put it between your hands with the stem sticking out between the middle and index fingers of your dominant hand. Roll the cherry very quickly and very lightly, around and around. This should make the top and bottom of the cherry smooth, but make the middle stick out, so turn the cherry so the stem pokes out toward you (between your thumbs) and roll it again, still quickly and lightly. Finally, roll it around sort of every which way in your palms to smooth it all over, once again quickly and lightly.

I emphasize the quickly and lightly part because the less pressure you put on the cherry, the rounder and nicer it will look. All of that should take 30 seconds at the most–the quicker you do it, the lighter your touch is likely to be. Hopefully.

Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part 2

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