Chubby Bunny

Impromptu Fudge

Yes. Fudge– the crossroads of sugar and chocolate chemistry. But of course, I did no such thing as to make it by heating, dissolving and recrystallizing sugar. Oh no. Rather, I tempered chocolate while melting marshmallows with butter in a small pot…all while not-so-secretly (to myself) not knowing what I was really trying to go for.

So I stood there with a small metal pot and spoon thinking about copper’s heat conductivity and whether or not to invest in a copper mixing bowl.

And a candy thermometer.

And a microplane.

And a million other ways to cut up my peasant-sized paycheck.

As I was saying. I stood there facing a glop that looked like seized chocolate…
Except it wasn’t. And fortunately so.

What is impromptu fudge?

Working with only an idea and a rough sketch of what to do in my head (aka, no recipe), I started with a double boiler, tempering chocolate for the sake of practicing how to temper chocolate. Why practice? Well, wait a few weeks and I’ll try to take your breath away like a belated Halloween vampire. What is tempering? It’s heating up (to melt) and then cooling down chocolate (usually by adding solid chocolate pieces to the melted chocolate) so that it crystallizes appropriately to yield a shiny final product.

And you like shiny things. I know.
(I like shiny things too.)

There I was, tempering away, reciting over and over again why we’re using metal utensils and not wooden (wood retains water which could seize chocolate and make you cry…over seized chocolate.) Chocolate is ultra-sensitive to exposures to any liquid or anything with a very different temperature. In exemplem: steam from a double-boiler. Which was why I was nervous when it started to clump up a little.

But it was okay. Because it was just the marshmallow breaking down, but not melting smoothly the way it would had this been a rice-krispie-treat-making sort of afternoon.

I decided there wasn’t going to be enough heat to do this in a reasonable amount of time if I kept using the double boiler. So I put everything into a clean pot and continued my thought-to-be disaster from there.

And I was baffled for a bit why my marshmallows were not turning into a soft goo. I thought about what marshmallow really is– corn syrup, sugar, gelatin. And there was the answer.

Gelatin is a protein. So I did not have to worry about it not doing its job. In fact, I can rely on this protein to get this chocolate mess together.

After throwing in a little more chocolate to reduce the protein structure of the brewing paste (fat interrupts more than just your blood vessels, see?) it became a smoother paste, indicating that the time to fold in crushed walnuts has arrived.

Behold. A concoction of

• 12 poofy marshmallows
• ~ 1 cup of chocolate (chip, kisses, squares, whatever)
• ~ 1 cup of crushed walnuts
• 2-3 T butter, as needed

I would not recommend running a knife through the walnuts to chop it– you’ll be slicing up the fudge log anyway, giving a mosaic-walnut look. The purpose of crusing them is to make it easier to fold and mold into a log.