Tag Archives: ice-cream

What DO you do about fudge that hasn’t set?

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Unset fudge

***UPDATE,  JANUARY 2013 – FOLLOWING THE POPULARITY OF THIS PAGE, I HAVE SET UP A WHOLE SEPARATE SITE ABOUT FUDGE, AND ALL THINGS SWEET! VISIT HERE… http://sugarness.com/ ***

Today’s post is brought to you as a public service. I am aware that this post might displease my regular followers who come here for mindless drivel and not useful information, but sometimes we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good.

Back in March I did a post entitled Just Another Morning where I described a rather manic, but typical, morning I had experienced. One of the things I mentioned in the long list of mishaps was that the fudge we made for my daughter to take to school hadn’t set. Since then, when I look at my blog stats, I notice a significant amount of people ending up on my blog after using search terms along the lines of ‘why hasn’t my fudge set’. They come here looking for a solution to their non-setting fudge, and all they find are my manic ramblings!

I’ve been feeling bad for all those people who may think they have been brought here under false pretenses, and I have therefore done some research, and I offer below some solutions to the fudge problems…

Options for what you can do with your unset fudge:

OPTION 1) Depending on how runny it is, you can either use it as a frosting for cakes, or a sauce for ice-cream.

OPTION 2) Freeze it overnight. Cut it into squares. Cover each square thickly in melted chocolate, ensuring no part of the fudge is exposed. Cross your fingers and hope that the chocolate sets firmly before the fudge starts to thaw, and later impress your friends as you present them with your soft-centred chocolates.

OPTION 3) Sieve together some powdered sugar and cocoa powder, and gradually work this into your unset fudge until it reaches the consistency of dough, then roll out and cut into squares, or shape into balls and then roll in powdered sugar (roll the balls in icing sugar, not yourself).

OPTION 4) If you think the reason it didn’t set was because you didn’t heat it to the right temperature, you could try putting it back into the pan and re-cooking.

How to make sure you get it right next time:

- Follow the recipe exactly. Cooked fudge, like any candy-making, is a pretty exact science, so ensure you measure ingredients carefully, add them in the right order, and heat to the right temperature (don’t guess, use a candy thermometer).

- Use a heavy based pan to prevent it burning on the bottom, and heat the mixture up to the required temperature nice and slowly.

- Once it has reached the required temperature, keep it on a rolling boil until it reaches the soft ball stage (a small amount dropped into cold water turns into a pliable ball).

- When you remove it from the heat, leave it in the pan to cool by a couple of degrees before stirring it or pouring it out.

If everything fails:

Give up on making cooked fudge, and search online for the many delicious recipes for no-cook fudge available. Yes, I could have posted some of those here, but I’m not going to do ALL the work for you.

Hope this information was helpful to any of you fudge visitors, do come back and visit any time! Oh, and bring fudge samples.

You’re welcome ;)

And for my regular visitors – normal service will resume shortly, thank you for your patience.

My 10 on Tuesday

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.Vanessa as Junior Miss Pontins

A bit of frivolity today. I’ve seen a few bloggers doing this ’10 on Tuesday’ thing. My understanding is that it started out with people asking 10 specific questions on a Tuesday, which others then answered on their own blog. Other people seem have adopted the theme of 10 on Tuesday by just doing their own random 10 things on a Tuesday. I may have completely misunderstood the whole thing, but I’m going to go with it anyway and do 10 facts about me that you probably don’t know (unless you’re one of my close friends, in which case you will certainly know some of them).

1) When I was 6, I lived for a year up in the French Alps with just my mother and another family. We were away from society, completely self-sufficient with no electricity/plumbing etc. I have a very good memory of my childhood and will probably write more about this experience at some point.

2) In 1982 I won Junior Miss Pontin’s whilst on a school trip, hence the photo at the top of this post. I’m pretty sure it was the socks that swung it for me

3) When I was in my late 20s/early 30s I lived in Las Vegas for four and a half years. During that time I appeared in a few TV adverts for casinos.

4) During an actual performance of a play I was in a few years ago, a fellow actor accidentally stamped on my hand on stage and broke my finger. I carried on through the rest of the play with my finger swelling, my fingernail hanging off, and blood dripping all over the stage (what a trooper eh?).

5) One day in the mid 90s, a big black limo pulled up to where I was standing and the driver got out to ask me directions. Whilst I was speaking with him, the windows of the limo rolled down and inside were the five Take That boys! They started calling out comments to me and laughing (not unkindly, just messing about). I turned into an absolutely pathetic girly giggling mess who completely lost the power of speech.

6) My Dad (an electronics engineer) taught me to wire a plug when I was 8 years old. I don’t think he knew that I used to go around the house unwiring and rewiring plugs to practise after that.

7) I am allergic to Quorn (yes that’s Quorn, not corn). Or I should probably say intolerant rather than allergic. This is a strange thing for me because I have a strong stomach and can eat anything. I have never been allergic/intolerant/sensitive to anything, yet if I eat even a small piece of Quorn I develop unbelievably excruciating stomach pains.

8) When I was working as a PA on the outskirts of NW London in my 20s, the Managing Director one day asked me to take his car to go and collect a VIP visitor from the train station which was a few minutes drive away (when I say VIP, it’s not anyone you would have heard of, but he was a VIP in the industry we were in). I was a bit nervous, partly because the visitor was a bit of a legend in our game, and partly because I was driving the boss’s big flashy expensive car. After picking him up, I took a wrong turn and ended up on an unfamiliar one-way system which then took me onto a motorway. We drove for many miles up the motorway, where I developed a nervous and slightly hysterical laugh that went on for an uncomfortably long amount of time. When we finally exited the motorway I was completely lost. Almost 2 hours later we made it back to the office. I’m pretty certain that at some point during the drive, the visitor genuinely became concerned that I was some insane woman who had kidnapped him.

9) When I was a child I used to share ice-cream cones with my cat. I would hold it and we would lick a side each for a while. Then I would twist it round so that we could each have a lick of the other side. She liked strawberry best.

10) When I was about 3 or 4 years old, on several occasions I stole a tub of margarine out of our fridge at home and then took it up to my room where I proceeded to eat my way through it with a spoon (I told you I had a strong stomach). It took my parents a while to work out where the margarine kept disappearing to. They eventually found a stash of empty margarine tubs in the wendy house in my room and soon after that a lock appeared on the fridge.

Oh, is that the 10 done already? And I was having such fun.