If you’ve ever considered flavoring desserts with Coca Cola, oh man, this post is for you. This is a work in progress, but this is my method so far.

This candy bar has dominated my thoughts for the past week, but the idea of using Coca-Cola in desserts goes back to July in France, when I read the recipe for Coca-Cola Cupcakes in the “Children” section of Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess. After researching more about it, I found that it’s based on a classic Southern dessert. I finally made it the weekend before last, but I loosely quote someone who I found by Googling the cake by asking: “Are these cupcakes supposed to sink in the middle?” Even if you bake them for an ungodly amount of time to make sure that they don’t sink in the middle, and you finally take them out when their tops are disquietingly rubbery, they are still quite wet inside. But by the time we ate five of them with the suggested Coca-Cola icing and Chad asked “Is it bad that I like these so much?” I knew that they would not be the end of our Coca-Cola flavored desserts.

Coca-Cola desserts are actually quite interesting. The flavor of Coca-Cola marries very well with cocoa; I think because of its intimations of caramel and spice. So, there’s that, but there’s also a certain chemistry to some Coca-Cola Cakes. Many of them require that you melt marshmallows into boiled coke, sugar, and butter. After you get over the fact that the cake calls for 3 forms of sugar — granulated sugar, coke, and marshmallows — you start to wonder about the effects of the gelatin from the marshmallows on the texture of the cake. As far as I can tell, it gives the cake a very moist texture, as was the case with this recipe that I made (but the Coke flavor was too weak in this one for me). This other recipe that I tried calls for the marshmallows to be stirred into the cake, so that they rise to the top of the batter in the pan and melt on top as it’s baked. The marshmallows leave little moist craters on the surface of the cake. Overall, though, I think that the drawback of the marshmallows is that dulling sort of sweetness that they imbue; Lawson’s recipe omits the marshmallows, and the flavor of the Coke was much stronger.

I thought about continuing my quest for the perfect Coca-Cola Cake (by maybe just adding more flour to the Lawson recipe), but after making so many of them and thinking about Coca-Cola so much, I became more interested in making a Coke candy bar. My first thoughts were about how well Snickers and Coca-Cola go well together (in a crazy sugar high sort of way), so I thought I might integrate a Cola flavor into peanut-flavored nougat and caramel. But then it seemed a little ridiculous to go through so much effort to formulate a recipe for something that you can already taste just by eating the candy bar with the soda. I considered walnuts or pecans instead, but around this time I really started thinking about how tricky it might be to get the cola flavor into the nougat and caramel, so the nuts seemed like they might overwhelm the flavor too easily. Then I thought about honeycomb candy, and how well it may simulate the fizziness of Coke and provide a crunchy texture to go with nougat and caramel. So, that got me to this plan — Cola nougat, Cola caramel, and crushed Cola honeycomb candy enrobed in milk chocolate. Chad was here again this weekend, so I thought it would be cool to play around with it and see what we came up with.

The flavoring was the hardest thing straight off the bat. I’m sure that Cola syrups and extracts can be found, but I generally don’t like how things like that taste and cost– though they’d probably work pretty easily and would just need to be stirred in like vanilla extract. Instead, I read the ingredients on a bottle of Coca-Cola, and I saw that they are “water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine.” Corn syrup seemed to be the only ingredient of real substance, and coincidentally, that’s an ingredient in some caramels and nougats. So, I found that by reducing coke by 1/5 produced a working kind of a syrup that could be used either as corn syrup or a flavoring syrup like Monin; but I don’t think you want to caramelize it as you reduce it, so the temp can’t get too high. It gets a little more bitter as you reduce it (maybe from the caffeine), but it still retains the Coke flavor, and if you’re making a candy bar, you’ll surely be adding more sugar to it anyway. The trick with using the syrup, though, is that once you add it to anything, it turns it dark brown and you can no longer judge the color of the original mixture if you’re going to caramelize it. You have to either judge by temperature or cold water tests.

So, I made this recipe for nougat, substituting the Cola syrup for corn syrup. The consistency was my biggest concern for the nougat. I didn’t want it to be too hard, and I didn’t have the luxury of wanting to add, say, peanut butter to it to give it more body. So, I thought that cooking the sugar to 270 was a good idea, so that the sugar wouldn’t get to a hard stage. In that sense, and in the sense that the recipe doesn’t contain honey or nuts, it wasn’t a true nougat. It was more like a creamy marshmallow that wasn’t as thick as, say, a Three Musketeers or Snickers.

For the caramel, I adapted the recipe for the Caramel Nut Tart that I made for my Restaurants Desserts Practical because I know quite well how it works, since I’d made it a few different ways and knew that one amount of cream would make it crystallize (because there wasn’t enough dairy) and a slightly larger amount of cream would make it gooey. I decided that the Cola syrup would be best as a flavoring agent to be added at the end for this one, so I just cooked up water and sugar to a deep golden caramel and then added an amount of cream that was slightly more than the crystallized amount as well as a Tbs of Cola syrup (b/c corn syrup also inhibits crystallization). It ended up looking a little bubbly and dark, though, so I added a few slivers of butter to smooth it out. It turned out nicely soft, but not as Cola-licious as I would have liked, so I stirred in more Cola syrup when it was cool and the flavor was quite nice.

For the honeycomb candy, I adapted this recipe from Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book. It has corn syrup in it, so I tried it once substituting my Cola syrup for it and cooking it to 300F as specified, but it turned out like bitter burnt caramel. So, for my version that I used in my candy bar, I decided to forget about the Cola syrup because it would only fight with the flavor of caramelized sugar, and I cooked it only to 290F, with the hope that residual heat would carry it at most to 295F. It turned out perfectly golden and fizzy.

So, for the assembly, I had two paths for the nougat: one in little domino-shaped silicon molds and one as a big slab. Once I realized how soft the nougat was, the slab became infinitely more desirable. For one thing, they would have to be pre-coated with chocolate on the bottom, which is a lot easier to do with a big slab than dominoes; you have to pre-coat the bottom by spreading a thin layer of chocolate with an offset spatula or else, if you try to dip them in chocolate as is, they’ll lose all sense of shape. Also, unless maybe you slightly freeze the nougat in the molds, they’re going to warp as they’re unmolded. So, the best method was to pre-coat a slab of nougat with chocolate on the bottom, spread caramel on top, and then press shards of honeycomb candy on top (I thought about putting the honeycomb between the nougat and the caramel, but honeycomb candy usually loses its crunch within a couple days, so the more I could keep it away from moisture (say, coated with chocolate), the better it might last). Then, cut them into fun-size shapes with a chef’s knife, and enrobe at will.

A cross-section of mine turned out like this:

Tweaks probably need to be made: the caramel could be a little firmer, the honeycomb could probably be chopped a little more finely, and the “nougat” could be a little firmer. I think that pairing straight chocolate with Cola flavor is a bit too sharp; I’d rather have Cola paired with cocoa or nougat made with melted chocolate to take off the edge.

But in its own way, it works. The nougat is downright creamy and Cola-y, the caramel is Cola-y, and the honeycomb is crunchy and provides a distinctive texture for the top. Maybe it’s more like a Coca-Cola Float Candy Bar. In any case, I can’t help thinking, “Is it bad that I like these so much…?”

P.S. - I searched for other soda-based recipes on the web, and was especially intrigued by this Dr. Pepper Cherry Marshmallow Cake. I can’t quite bring myself to buy yellow cake mix and two boxes of Jell-o to make a cake (and the description of it makes Chad go apoplectic), but if anybody has any knowledge about this cake, please let me know, because, oh man, it’s a self-icing cake!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Recipes - Dessert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.