SC - Oh Fudge! OOP
Bonne of Traquair
oftraquair at hotmail.com
Tue Feb 13 14:55:04 PST 2001
My daughter wants to make her boyfriend a batch of fudge for Valentine's
Day. This morning I made sure all the ingredients were around, and then,
naturally, decided to make a batch for the rest of us.
The chocolate and milk and sugar were boiling happily on the stove. I
reached into the drawer to get the instant read thermometer, and discovered
it doesn't go up to candy making temperatures! It stops at 220 F and I
needed to know when the temp was about 234 F. I couldn't stop at that point
to find the chart describing the soft ball to hard crack stages of sugar
cooking, so I guessed that having the needle go a little past the 220 mark
would have to do. Pulled it off the burner, added the butter and vanilla
and waited for it to cool back down to 110 F before proceeding to the
beating. So far, so good. I thought.
Looking at it a few minutes later, I realized it was already crystalizing!
I stirred in what butter I could, and scaped the stuff from the saucepan to
the cooling tray. The rest of it, now hard chocolate candy, is currently
soaking out of the saucepan.
I need ideas for what to do with this stuff I have. It's chocolate sugar.
Sugar crystals the size of normal sugar crystals, but they are chocolate. A
few lumps that are larger are easily crushed. Taste yum, but a bit messy.
Off hand, I can imagine it might flavor hot cocoa nicely. Vanilla ice cream
is the traditional repository of failed fudge that refuses to crystalize -
ta-da, it's fudge sauce. But I guess these crystals can be sprinkled over
the ice cream.
Any other ideas?
I'm off to buy a candy thermometer. I hope there is such a thing as an
instant read version. I've broken more than one of that kind with the
regular thermometer in a test tube.
Bonne
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