Last week I had friends. We're still friends, but last week I got to hang out with them. And it was really a lot of fun. Ok. That sounds like something a first grader would say. Perhaps because, like a first grader, for the past year and a half I haven't really hung out with any friends and I am just starting to get back in the groove. Just starting out on an adventure of having my first play dates all over again.
We had a mini baking party where there were some amazing gingerbread cupcakes made, what was supposed to be some amazing fudge and topped off with dipping pretzels into chocolate which I never thought could be so relaxing.
I've never made fudge before and was excited to try it. I've been having a craving for something overwhelmingly sweet and there's nothing like a couple squares of fudge to cure all sugar cravings. I got my ingredients written down and headed on my way to the local grocer where half my total came because of the high-quality baking ingredients I desperately needed. There was no way I was going to let some cheap chocolate chips ruin my what-was-going-to-be-awesome fudge. I had heard this was key.
We got everything into the pan and started cooking and I was advised that it's best to stir only one way when making fudge instead of my usual back and forth, side to side and figure eight stirring that I use to make awesome scotcheroos. I panicked. Instead of going in and stirring to the right, which would make total sense, I started in from the left. I didn't know I was so partial to one way of stirring over another but I knew after the third stroke that I was going the wrong way. Luckily, Morgan is left-handed and she quickly took over and did an awesome job of stirring for the required amount of time of which I thought was 3 minutes after it started to boil. Not so much we learned later, but I was bound to follow that recipe to the second. Dumb recipe. It's not always good to trust what you find on pinterest.
By the time we were ready to pour our amazingness into the casserole dish we found an interesting development. A mountain of marshmallow cream was carefully designed in the bottom middle of our pot. All that stirring in one direction had formed a perfectly sized Mt. Rainier. We didn't bother about it but had a good laugh about our abundant surprise.
When the fudge was still wobbling in the dish after 2 hours I was a little concerned but there wasn't much I could do about it but take it home. We ladled some in to a ziplock baggie for Morgan to take with her and Shelli let me take her pan home for the fudge to finish settling. Because it would settle. Because we had used the finest ingredients and because we had followed the recipe to the second.
The next morning I was too nervous to check in on our creation so it sat in the fridge, undisturbed. When I got home and tried cutting it into squares and it just ran together again as soon as I took the knife out I knew I needed another plan of action. So I froze it. Only, I guess fudge doesn't freeze. That stuff still couldn't be cut into squares after being in the freezer for a couple of hours. I put it back in the fridge and awaited a miracle. This is where the epic fail turns into an epic win.
I had my little brother in the kitchen the next morning digging through my fridge for some breakfast when he found the fudge and naturally wanted to taste it. He pulled it out and looked at it. "How come all the cookies are just on one side?" I had to explain to him that when we ladled Morgan's portion out that everything had slid to fill the empty space, leaving the crumbled cookies that I had put on top on only one half. The whole thing looked like a piece out of the land before time movies. The part in the first one about the great divide.
He pulled out a piece and rolled it in a ball before popping it in his mouth and declared that the concoction would taste better on ice cream. Him rolling the stuff into a ball though gave me a brilliant idea. I had been seeing a lot of truffles and cake pops around lately and so balls dipped in chocolate was currently on my mind. It was the most pliable way I could think of how to get that stuff into a mouth without a spoon. We spent the morning rolling balls and dipping them in melted chocolate. John rolled and I dipped and by the end we didn't have such a disastrous project. In fact, it could have passed as planned.
I put the best looking ones into a baggie for Shelli and her husband and the rest I piled into a tupperware to take to work. The break room table is common ground for kitchen experiments and epic fails. Sugar is sugar and after working 2 hours serving the public between breaks, anything is welcome.
Well. They were a win. No one could tell that it was a fudge fail. The texture was great due to Morgan's excellent stirring and the hard chocolate kept the runny gooiness in check. I did learn some basic fudge making tips that I am going to try the next time I get the courage up to cook something on the stove other than dinner and overall, things could have been much worse. I would call this one a win.
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