Fudge on its way to make someone happy
Did you think I had gone for good? Not yet. Hello! Happy Middle of January everybody! I have lots of lovely photos of things to share but I haven’t got round to writing the posts. I look at the photos and then I look at the keyboard, and my back hurts and I can just think of other things I would rather be doing than blogging, but this one was just begging to be written so here goes with one of those recipe posts with asides designed to let you into the cluttered (clotted?) thought processes of my mind. I think there must be a name for this type of post. Food Confessional? Bridget Jones Does Food? or the ‘OK it is a recipe post but really I am lonely and want you to love me by leaving me lots of comments sort of a post’ ? I am not sure, but they are fun to write anyway.
Clotted Cream Vanilla Fudge with Glacė Cherries
Do you have food stuffs like this in your home? I am sure you don’t, but every time I have opened the fridge since Christmas this tub of Roddas finest clotted cream has waved at me.
“Yoo, hoo”, it says, “What are you going to do with me????” And today it was waving slightly frantically and whispering in an out of date sort of way,
“Surely, you are not going to chuck me, just because of a date, no-ooo-ooo!!!”
Chopped up small!
Why didn’t we just eat it as it was? All will be revealed…
We don’t eat cream out of the carton on account of the asthma thing plus I am not good at eating fresh cream, it makes my tum gurgle and roil, but if it is boiled up and turned into fudge then suddenly it does neither of these things. Oh dear, this is turning into one of those 7 not very interesting facts you never really wanted to know about me sort of posts, get a grip Joanna – right now. OK here goes…. (pdf for recipe without all the asides click here)
- 227 g carton out of date but perfectly good Roddas clotted cream (meant for Mother-in-Law at Christmas who couldn’t come due to an outbreak of winter virus at her nursing home, well you did wonder I am sure, and you see that bag in the first picture, it’s going to her today)
- 275 g of organic unrefined granulated sugar (Billingtons must have had an offer on when I bought this)
- 50 g golden syrup (do you like those new bottles they sell this in? they sort of crackle don’t they? I find them very unnerving)
- 50 g Danish (probably Swedish, see Misky’s comment) light syrup (another lost soul in the pullout purchased circa 2008 as I had squeezed all I could from the golden syrup bottle)
- pinch of sea salt
- 1/2 teaspoon of homemade vanilla essence (I have a litre of this made circa 2009)
- a teaspoon of glucose syrup (bb 2007, unopened)
- 120 g of glacė cherries (2012 Yay!) cut up with scissors for speed (meant for a Christmas cake that didn’t happen, not the natural ones, but the bright red ones that my husband considers to be ‘proper cherries’)
- Have a glass of cold water near your hob.
- Line an 18 cm square tin, bottom and sides, with baking parchment.
- Put the extra halves of cherries in the pan, which should appear on the top when you eventually turn the fudge out. (This was an afterthought, I freely admit, I am big on afterthoughts)
- Put everything except the cherries, in a deep heavy bottomed pan.
- Gently heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved and everything is well mixed
- Increase heat and put your sugar thermometer in the pan.
- When the mixture reaches the soft ball mark (116° C) lift pan off heat and drop a blob from your wooden spoon into the glass of cold water. it should form a nice soft but distinct mass, if it just dissolves into a cloud, it is not hot enough. I get little blobs with tails usually.You should most definitely taste to confirm the evidence of your eyes and the thermometer of course. You could do it again to double check if you happen to be fasting on the day you make this. (I am a mad impetuous fool).
- If you add the cherries about halfway through the next stage or as close to the end of the beating part as you can, then they won’t break up as much as mine did.Though ours went a delightful – some people might mutter ‘lurid’ under their breaths – shade of pink (hidden benefits).
Halfway through Beating up the Fudge
- Find someone who likes beating a pan vigorously with a spoon for about five to ten minutes and offer them some inducement to do the hard bit, which is to beat the fudge until it goes thick and starts to seize up, the colour also changes from super shiny, through to a matt look. Or do it yourself if you are firm of arm and enjoy such activities.
- Pour and scrape the mixture into the prepared tin and leave to cool completely or even over night.
- Turn out, peel the parchment away, and cut into small squares with a heavy knife and swiftly dispense to everyone who likes it. If you have any left, then keep it in the fridge and it will get more grainy and less creamy over time. If one small and delectable square happens to find its way into your mouth, forgive yourself. Life is short and there will be more steamed vegetables tomorrow. Steamed broccoli fudge doesn’t have quite the same ring to it though, does it?
- Do you have any exotic leftovers from Christmas in your fridge that you need to use up?
PS For a much more detailed and serious discussion on getting your fudge just right do read Celia’s great post here. Life is a learning curve.
Zeb Bakes 
Clotted cream fudge looks and sounds utterly divine – hooray for leftovers inspiring such a delicious treat!
He he! Thanks for reading – I am still thinking about your chocolate frangipane cherry tarts.. we would like those a lot here :)
Yummy! A question: where did you buy the Danish light syrup? I use the dark syrup for Danish rye bread, packing home another bottle every time we go there. :)
I have a feeling now I think about it (the trouble with speed blogging) that it is Swedish from the Swedish shop in London. Website here : http://www.totallyswedish.com/en/search/node/syrup
Thanks! I’ll have a browse around. Fun, fun, fun! :)
Nice to read something from you Joanna, and a Happy New Year! I love the way you write, you make me smile, it’s just as if you are talking to me, very friendly.
Hi Jeannette but I am talking to you (I have to think that, or else I would just be like my mother talking into her handbag, come to think of it she would have enjoyed blogging enormously) and I love it when you reply too :)
So glad to hear from you- I’m not that fond of fudge- but loved all the asides as I’d been missing you dreadfully, my friend!
If I had a tin of clotted cream in my fridge…well, actually, I wouldn’t. I buy it very infrequently- having to go to a specialty store to buy it and since I am very fond of scones (unlike fudge) I would have it used up in no time at all!
I DO have some spice cookie rolls left that I could slice and bake. And a whole bag of almond meal that I bought to make cookies- but I ran out of time and inspiration. Now I have time, but still no inspiration…the January blues reign in my household and I have my head tucked into any book I can find that will distract me. I pull myself free long enough to make up boring “tried and true” dinner recipes so that my husband won’t leave me- but the joy isn’t there.
I hate the winter months.
I quite like January, the month of low expectations and snowdrops but I am perverse Heidi! Brian is the fudge fan and my Dad, who we visited at the weekend and I have some lovely landscape photos for my next post to share with you. I have almond meal too and almonds and so much stuff… for the almond meal I was thinking about frangipane. Saw a lovely chocolate frangipane tart on the Little Loaf’s blog today. Shall we have a go at baking them together? xx Jo http://thelittleloaf.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/chocolate-cherry-frangipane-tarts/
It looks beautiful! Making proper fudge was probably my proudest achievement from last year.
Yes! I get so excited when things work too!! I have dire memories of unset fudge making episodes as a child so it is brilliant when finally you revisit these things decades later and they work! Thanks Alicia !
Ooo, gorgeous! I love fudge. And I know I’m not really meant to but I much prefer a cheery artificial red cherry to the dreary natural ones ;-)
Thanks! Yes they are certainly bright and cheerful, glowing even :)
Happy New Year.
The fudge looks delicious. It has prompted me to think about making some of the things I promised myself I would this Christmas and did not have enough time such as Chocolate & Coconut fudge and Hazelnut praline. I did find the time to make a chocolate caramel parfait and chocolate christmas cake both of which turned out well – although the chocolate christmas cake took far longer to cook than the recipe said and caused lots of anxiety as it refused to ‘set’ for quite some time. I think it was the fruit soaked in liquer that caused the issue.
Praline…. mmmm…. and yes more fudge, if you tell yourself you are using up the leftovers then it all begins to make perfect sense. I have never made a parfait, you will have to teach me how to do it one day soon Elaine :) Hope all’s well and the commuting not too tiring xx
Would love to show you how to make the parfait. All is well and commuting not too tiring but getting fed up with all the snow – although that does mean working from home. We will have to meet up soon :) will e-mail to look at dates. xxx
I’m happy to see evidence of three things here: nice to see you back on the playground for some exercise; pleased to know that I’m not alone in the quest not to throw away ‘old’ things (infrequently, I feel a rising sense of caution inside me that wants to warn against germs and bad bacteria that might just be taking up residence in some of the old things, but those fears are usually quelled by my strong belief that my personal immune system is constantly on the lookout for baddies to practice on!); and I’m joyed to see that your sense of humor is still alive and well. I’m going to pass on the fudge tho, lest it kick me into a diabetic coma – my choice for the clotted cream might have been for dipping some mid-winter strawberries, or for making my french toast a bit more special.
Hello Doc – is that you on the swings over there? it is lovely to be back and exercise my fingers and grumble at my typos. If blogging isn’t fun, there isn’t much point in doing it is there, I think we agree on that :)
As far as the germs and bacteria thing goes, to date, touch wood, I have never had food poisoning, except from a dirty water glass in a cafe in another country. By now my guts must be full of fermented this that and the other, so I hope the friendly bacteria just deal with any rogues that turn up.
Certain classes of food stuffs I am very cautious about, like prepacked dips or fresh sausages, paté, that sort of thing, highly processed food that deteriorates once its packaging has been opened and exposed to air. Dairy products are easy enough to tell when they have gone bad. There are certain rules I follow like the ones about storing cooked rice and not reheating cooked foods more than once and so on, but as to best before dates, well that is what they are – best before, not lethal thereafter. Sugar doesn’t go bad, does it? just dry and loses taste and aroma. I am careful about my choices in restaurants too and never ever have that ‘last special portion of osso bucco’ or whatever it is they are trying to shift… (memories of working as a waitress in an Italian restaurant).
Beautiful fudge! I love the cherries in it! Happy Middle of January to you too! xx
It’s good stuff – and I have only eaten two bits of it (so far) We are waiting for snow and you are waiting for your next load of mega heat, the extremes of the time of year :)
Nice to see a post from you – and with such a lovely product. I bet it wouldn’t have gone half as well if you’d planned ahead to make cherry fudge!
Commiserations on the fasting dilemma. I don’t count tastes from the pan when I’m cooking for others and fasting myself! The problem then, is that tasting sets the digestive juices flowing with nothing to work on.;)
It is very good, I am very pleased with the result Suelle. I don’t think I would have gone out and bought clotted cream specifically to make fudge, but now I know how good it is I might :) I was OK with the taste test, it really was a tiny amount and didn’t trigger anything too terrible. I am a newbie at this fasting lark and I am quite enjoying it :)
So good to “hear” from you! Well, I never had this type of sweet before, and now I am wondering about the texture, the taste, and salivating all over the keyboard… see what you did? :-)
Great post, hope your back feels fully recovered soon, so you can indulge in some serious food blog writing!
I don’t know if I will ever write serious food posts again, I seem to do best at frivolity :) Check out Celia’s classic fudge posts on her blog, they will give you lots of guidance should you be tempted to make fudge, she kindly pointed me to them last night. (I might have to make some more, just for the practice of course!) My back is an old age/old injury problem so it is more a question of management than anything else right now, but thanks Sally, you are a lovely friend xx
Hello Joanna, I thought I heard voices out here as we’ll as the words “clotted cream”. Can’t stay long, I couldn’t find my mittens and I have school work to do. If I’m ever tucked up in a nursing home (which might well happen if I slip off the seat of this freezing see-saw) I hope someone brings me clotted cream fudge to puff up my cheek pouches.
Hello Jan – mittens? snow for you too? ours finally reached Bristol this morning and the UK is predictably shutting down.. I might venture out with my own cheek pouches stuffed with fudge later on… xx
My kids discovered clotted cream on our last visit to the UK and they were in heaven. Particularly my son who graduated from eating it with scones and jam (lots of high teas!) to eating it with a spoon straight out of the carton. We had lots of fun trying different versions of it, including one memorable one from Neal’s Yard dairy I think. When I say ‘we’ I mean that I bought and he ate. Cream and I are not good friends either. I am dairy intolerant but for some reason cream is the absolute worst for me. Even a tiny bit makes me sick, whereas a tiny bit of milk, copious quantities of butter, all seem fine.
Good idea to make fudge with it, too sad to just chuck out such a lovely product. I am sure the oldies in the nursing home will be fighting over it!
Some people adore it with a passion, my mother-in-law and your kids have something in common. I am not dairy intolerant, just find it hard to digest cream I think. B is allergic to some protein or other in there, that gets altered by fermentation and high heat. Hey but a good excuse to make sweets, I nearly made truffles but you don’t really heat it up for long enough to make them good for B to eat. Fudge was a good solution :)
Any excuse, right?! :)
It is 40 C here (Australia) and fudge is not on the menu at the moment but I loved reading about it! You have a very nice writing style, thank you!
Hello, nice to meet you Ardysez! I have heard about how hot it is and can imagine you don’t want more than chilled watermelon in that sort of temperature. Phew!
Yay, a Joanna post! :-) Love projects like this that use all of the fridge/pantry leftovers. And so good to read this, as I just made my first batch of fudge and the texture was off…realizing that when it said to beat it until matte, I had no idea what it meant so only stirred for a minute or two. But you said 5+ minutes until it’s matte AND stiffens….aha! That was my problem. So get to read a you-post and you helped me! Win-win.
I have read a lot more since I wrote this and I think we got lucky, because we kept stopping our beating and so our beating was more intermittent than maybe it sounds in the post. Read Celia’s posts on her blog and there is so much more to it than I realised. Hope all’s well with you Abby xx
Ooh, you’re right: that is a helpful post. And it looks like I did way more than one thing wrong. Oops! Well, the grainy batch is gone so I guess it’s time to try again…..such is life….how sad, more fudge to taste. hehe :-)
Mine never set when I was a kid, let alone got grainy, (i rather like grainy fudge but I was brought up on a chocolate bar called ‘A finger of Fudge’ which was very grainy, so I guess I thought all fudge was like that. However it comes, it is a treat :) I am sure yours was delicious Abby.
I’m not really a fudge person but I was so pleased to see a post from you again! I don’t have exotic leftovers from Christmas – any suggestions for half a jar of mincemeat and some cranberry sauce?
Ice cream? Do you ever make that, or line the bottom of a pastry tart and put apple slices on top. Not sure about cranberry sauce, not something I have very often. I have lots of lovely doggy watery pics to share with you Ann, coming up soon, love to you and Spot xx
There is absolutely no left ever goodies in my fridge from Christmas and I’m wondering why on earth not! On considering, I do think it was more not a lot of goodies to start with rather than me frantically eating them all. Well I’m sticking with that story anyway. (ahh, good to have you back Joanna, somewhere I feel completely comfortable enough to waffle on :-)
have a good weekend lovely. xxx
That sounds super organized of you, excellent :). Happy to hear you waffling anytime Brydie. xx
Ah, a mid-fudge-crisis post. They’re the best! I had some clotted cream and normal cream in the fridge with nothing to do, and made some ice cream with it. Using supermarket chocolate covered nougat, and it tastes strangely enough of peanut butter. If I’d set out to make p/b ice cream, I wouldn’t have used those ingredients for sure ….
I love the look of your fudge, what a clever cook you are. & Happy New Year, see you next week.
That would have been a great title for the post, he he. Your icecream sounds extraordinary. Gill, I wonder what created the peanut butter taste? See you next week, snow permitting and all that !
Alas no clotted cream available. It has a similar effect on me these days, can’t eat reasonable quantities of it or double cream without paying for it later, which is a shame because I used to like things like scottish cranachan. But fudge yes I can tolerate that. Any bugs that have been boiled in hot sugar are probably worth taking a chance with in my book. Goes off to check for chocolate fudge recipes…..
I haven’t had scottish cranachan, will go and look it up. I have also recently made this recipe of Dan Lepard’s which is in Short & Sweet for rum and raisin fudge, which was very good, it has chocolate in, so you could adapt it ? Here is the original Guardian version of the recipe
I’m making stuff for boy to take with cubs tomorrow so it has to be without lumps or foreign flavours! Choc fudge on the hob – and there will be some left over.
Yes, I can understand that, I thought one could adapt Dan’s recipe maybe and simply leave out the rum and raisins and add a bit of chocolate at the end. I hope boy was happy with home made fudge, such a treat !
Wow, that looks delicious! Wish I wasn’t on my annual January diet (soon to be forgotten in February…). Ha at ‘proper cherries’…!
I have started tentatively down the fasting for 2 days a week route, so one can eat fudge on the other days :)
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Looks delicious. Not a big cooker or baker but I do love the pictures – mouthwatering and pretty too !
Thank you! I am glad you like them, I don’t think I would do this if it wasn’t so easy to take photos digitally :)
the internet would be a very different world without the digital camera. . . blogging and following photo blogs has inspired me to upgrade my camera and do a little more snapping myself :)