Fudge. I am the fudge queen. It’s my favorite and the one I’m best at. I make the old fashioned style and it comes out perfect and smooth every time. It’s a lovely creamy melt in your mouth piece of perfection. I make lots of different flavors now. Yesterday I made a lovely peppermint fudge. mmmmmm.
I don’t even consider all those quick and easy “fudges” to be fudge at all. If the recipe calls for sweetened condensed milk, marshmallow creme, or velveeta (gag!), it’s not fudge! It’s just a chocolate candy that’s pretending.
I also make a great toffee. That stuff’s adictive.
We make boozy balls, which are bourbon balls using alternative liquors, and they always get snorked down right fast. My personal favorites are amaretto and Liquor 43, though SoCo, Bailey’s, and Kahlua ones are all nice too. And I saw someone make really tasty margarita balls by using tequila, triple sec, and dash of lime juice a while back.
And I always make several batches of marshmallows in various chocolate-friendly flavors. They’re dead simple if you have a stand mixer and a candy thermometer, and they’re very cheap, plus people absolutely lose their minds over them. If you make up some cocoa mix and put it in those little cellophane bags with some of the marshmallows cut small on top, plop it in a pretty mug–it’s a pretty nice stocking stuffer sort of gift.
I’ve seen a lot of different recommendations for how hot to cook them, and a lot of debate about how firm they typically come out. I tried a recipe from allrecipes Sunday, and cooked them to the temperature recommended in some of the comments because other people claimed the recipe left them too gooey to cut at room temp. Mine were about the firmness of a Riesen, which I personally kind of like because it slows me down in my caramel-eating rampage, but was a real bitch to cut up.
I don’t think that my family would let me in the door at Christmas if I didn’t bring my homemade peanut brittle. The recipe can be found at the Betty Crocker website. It is very good, but time consuming to make.