Fudge is the perfect food. It was clearly invented by a goddess of culinary arts. And it being the holidays and all (and my birthday, Christmas Eve) I figured that if a little fudge was good than a lot would be whatever two times good is.
My thought process went something like this: I’m going to make a mess in the kitchen. I’m going to a cool friend’s place on Christmas day. I may as well make enough to take to her house AND eat my own weight in fudge before I get there. It won’t be any bigger mess if I make more.
A double batch seemed like just the thing! I’ve made fudge probably a couple of hundred times in my life…piece of cake. Err…piece of fudge anyway.
So I got out my usual saucepan and tossed in a double recipe of the ingredients. About halfway through an amazing thing started happening. Apparently, stuff EXPANDS as it heats up. Who knew!? So my 3/4 full pot full of sugary goodness turned into a pot and a half. It boiled over all over the stove which then started to smoke.
Being the quick thinking sprite that I am, I grabbed another sauce pan and tossed some of the excess into that. Then I tried to fire up another burner to get it boiling again before it turned to sugar-flavored crap. Then I had two pots of boiling candy on two hot, smoking burners, the smoke alarm blaring, and a spoon in each hand trying furiously to keep the candy-mess from burning to the bottom of either one of the pans. Luckily, there was a knock on my door to interrupt me at just the crucial moment. I answered the door splattered in my version of a “tar and feathering” waving my spoons and shouting (over the alarm) that it wasn’t necessary to phone the fire department just yet. Strangely, I scared off my visitors.
I managed to get the whole mess into a cake pan and it’s cooling now. I’m shocked to find that it tastes like…fudge! Yummy! And it’s not gritty or anything either. My only concern now is that it will firm up to the consistency of fudge. If it doesn’t, I’m just going to tell my friend that it goes on top of ice cream.
I won’t tell her that I nearly burned my kitchen down making the stuff.