Sugar Plum Image Used Under Creative Commons License From theglobeandmail.com
Citizens – MERRY CHRISTMAS! 😀
To celebrate this most festive of holidays, I – the mighty TFD – gift you with a recipe for a dish you’ve heard of countless times and doubtless have no idea what it actually is: sugarplums!
A sugar plum is traditionally defined as a piece of dragée or hard candy made of hardened sugar in a small round or oval shape.
“Plum” in the name of this confection does not mean plum in the sense of the fruit of the same name, but referred to small size and spherical or oval shape. According to The Atlantic Monthly, traditional sugar plums contained no fruit, but were instead hardened sugar balls. According to the Huffington Post, these hardened sugar balls were comfits, and often surrounded a seed, nut, or spice.
As noted in an article in The Atlantic:
A little digging around in the OED gives some hints as to the elasticity of the word plum in the expression sugar plum. It names the fruit, of course, and the first sugar plums were likely named by association with the similar size and shape of nature’s plums. But as sugar plum passed into general usage in the 1600s, it came to have its own associated meanings quite apart from fruit.
If your mouth was full of sugar plums, it meant that you spoke sweet (but possibly deceitful) words. If you stuffed another’s mouth with sugar plums, that meant a sop or bribe that would shut someone up. In the 18th century, plum was British slang for 100 pounds, or more generally, a big pile of money. And someone who was rich could also be called a plum.
By the nineteenth century, plum has come to mean an especially desirable thing, a prize, a choice job or appointment. Trollope spells out the metaphor: “The chances are she won’t have you—that’s of course; plums like that don’t fall into a man’s mouth merely for shaking the tree.” As for the more recent U.S. usage of plums to refer to testicles, I will leave you to your own armchair etymologies.
So plum doesn’t just mean fruit; it can mean all manner of good things.
And sugar plum? By the 1860s, candy makers were using steam heat and mechanized rotating pans, so that less-skilled workers could make larger batches more easily. Sugar plums could be made in quantity, at a much lower price. So, sugar plums for all. And not just sugar plums. The falling price of sugar and the invention of labor-saving machinery meant all manner of small candies were heaping up on the confectioner’s counter. And by a process of lexical expansion and generalization, all of this candy, especially the small and the round or ovoid, could also be called sugar plum.
The recipe I give you today is actually a very modern re-interpretation of the term. In this non-traditional 21st-century take-off on the word “sugar plum”, dried fruit is chopped fine and combined with chopped almonds, honey, and aromatic spices, such as anise seed, fennel seed, caraway seeds, and cardamom. This mixture is rolled into balls, then coated in sugar or shredded coconut.
This version is unusual as it is actually rolled in violet marzipan to look like a plum and comes complete with green marzipan leaves! 🙂 I discovered the excellent recipe at thebakingpan.com and found it impossible to improve upon.
Line a large baking sheet or jelly roll pan with parchment paper or wax paper.
Place the toasted almonds, apricots, dates, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, and orange zest in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade and pulse into a finely ground mixture. Tip: The mixture should be finely ground but still crumbly; do not pulse into a puree or paste consistency.
Remove the fruit and nut mixture from the processor and place in a large mixing bowl. Add the Grand Marnier or brandy and honey and stir with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon until thoroughly mixed.
Shape mixture into small balls, about 1” in diameter, using about 1 tablespoon of mixture for each ball. Tip: A small ice cream scoop is ideal for making uniform-sized candies.
The balls will be moist and sticky until they sit and dry out a bit. Let sit at room temperature, or cover balls and refrigerate until well chilled, 1 to 2 hours to firm up and loose some of their stickiness. Roll in large-crystal sparkling sugar or coarse sugar. Or, cover with marzipan coating.
Store in an airtight container and refrigerate up to one month. Makes about three dozen 1-inch balls.
Marzipan Coating:
Determine how many Sugarplums you want to wrap with the marzipan coating. You will need about 1 ounce of marzipan for each sugarplum.
Tip: To cover 12 Sugarplums, I used 12 ounces of marzipan. Use 2 to 4 ounces of marzipan for the leaves, depending on how many leaves you desire. Use 2 ounces marzipan for about 12 leaves. Use 3 to 4 ounces marzipan if you want extra leaves.
Tint the larger portion of marzipan to wrap the Sugarplums with violet food coloring. Tint the smaller portion of marzipan for the leaves with leaf green plus electric green food coloring. Knead the marzipan until you get a consistent color with no streaks. Keep un-used marzipan covered to prevent drying out.
Dust a work surface with powdered sugar. Divide the violet colored marzipan into 1 ounce pieces. For each Sugarplum use a small rolling pin to roll the marzipan into a 4 inch circle, about ⅛ inch thickness.
Fold the marzipan around the Sugarplum to completely enclose it. Pinch the marzipan edges together and mold into a plum shape, with the top slightly pointed and the bottom slightly rounded. Flatten the bottom slightly if you wish the plums to stand up-right, otherwise let them lay on their sides. Make a crease vertically down the center of each Sugarplum with the back of a knife.
Lightly brush the marzipan plum with kirschwasser and roll in decorative or coarse sugar. Set aside. Tip: I first sprinkled a light coating of coarse organic sugar on the Sugarplum, and then rolled in decorative sparkling sugar crystals to get maximum sparkle.
Roll the green marzipan about ⅛ thick. Using a leaf cutter or cut freehand, cut out 1 or 2 leaves for each Sugarplum. Use the back of the knife to press lines into each leaf to resemble the leaf veins. Using a dry artist paintbrush, lightly brush each leaf with gold luster dust.
Use the tip of a toothpick to make a small hole in the top of each leaf. Push the tip of a whole clove through the hole you just made and then push the tip of the clove into the top of a Sugarplum to adhere the leaf, using 1 or 2 leaves for each Sugarplum. (Remove the clove pieces before eating the marzipan Sugarplums).
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