Have you ever noticed not everything is as easy as it seems?
I had an extra day home before Christmas because of inclement weather. I decided to take the opportunity to make fudge.
Mind you, I like all types of fudges, but I particularly love the old-fashioned kind that you have to cook and beat. In other words, recipes without the marshmallow cream ingredient. Granted, the marshmallow cream makes a nice creamy texture, but I prefer the texture that breaks into slivers as you bite into it.
I know old-fashioned fudge is trickier to make, but how hard can it be?
I dug to the bottom of my utensil drawer and found my trusty candy thermometer. How could I fail with that in hand?
I had helped my folks make fudge years ago and it came out perfect. I called Mom and got her recipe for peanut butter fudge, but she couldn’t find her chocolate fudge recipe. I had a hard time finding recipes on the Internet that didn’t use marshmallow cream. But I finally came up with a chocolate fudge recipe and one for my very favorite fudge, maple nut.
I started with the chocolate fudge and stirred and watched my candy thermometer diligently. When it reached the soft ball stage temperature, I removed it from the burner.
That’s when I remembered I was supposed to add vanilla at that stage, so I hurriedly grabbed my little brown bottle of vanilla off the shelf and splashed it in. Wait! Something was wrong. The aroma wafting up was anise. I had mistakenly grabbed the anise flavoring bottle. Well, I like anise. How bad can chocolate-anise fudge taste?
I allowed my husband Kirk the honor of beating the fudge. He said, “Hey, this stuff is getting really hard.” Then it turned into coffee grounds.
A little daunted, I mixed up a batch of peanut butter fudge. My folks have made this recipe for years with tasty results. Kirk was disheartened from the flop, so he was done beating. The recipe made a huge batch so I decided to beat it with my KitchenAid mixer on slow. Wrong! Within seconds, the mixture was hard and it crumbled apart.
I was becoming pretty disheartened myself and tempted to scrap the maple nut fudge recipe. But I decided to persevere.
This time, I had success. It made a small batch and had become such a valuable commodity to me because of the previous failures that I hoarded it all for myself.
Determined to discover the secrets to making fudge, I turned to the Internet. Obviously, the recipes I used, did not give enough instructions. I guess I was to know a few basics.
I found a site on the science of cooking. It explained that fudge is a crystalline candy and the secret to making it is to get the crystals to form at just the right time without turning totally to crystals. Once the candy syrup begins to boil, you should STOP stirring. Then when you remove it from the heat, you shouldn’t add ingredients like vanilla and peanut butter until it COOLS DOWN to 110 degrees and that is when you begin stirring.
I couldn’t bear to throw out the large batch of failed peanut butter fudge. I hated to waste all of the sugar and peanut butter that went into it. I came up with a brilliant plan to add eggs, milk, and baking soda to bake peanut butter bars. I had another flop on my hands and had to scrape the gooey mess out into the trash wasting even more ingredients.
Argh! I guess I should have just taken a nap that day.
LESSON: It takes more than confidence and a candy thermometer to make perfect fudge.
Or is it… Two failures do not make a successful pan of peanut butter bars.