Last night, as I was getting in bed, it dawned on me.\u00c2\u00a0 Real butter.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s why the fudge I made yesterday was absolutely perfect, melt-in-your-mouth, delicious.\u00c2\u00a0 Hmm.\u00c2\u00a0 Was it really? Yep. Perfect. Definitely much better than\u00c2\u00a0ANY of the fifty or so times I made it as a child.<\/p>\n
How is it better?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, it’s creamier, fudgier, not a hint of graininess.<\/p>\n
What did I do different?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, come to think of it, not once in all those times I made it as a child would I have ever thought to have used real butter.<\/p>\n
I’m looking at the recipe now.\u00c2\u00a0 To be fair, it does say “butter or margarine.”\u00c2\u00a0 You only use two tablespoons, and you don’t even cook with it.\u00c2\u00a0 You mix in the butter right after you finish cooking.\u00c2\u00a0 Then you let it cool.\u00c2\u00a0 Then when it’s cooler, you vigorously mix in vanilla until it turns into fudge.<\/p>\n
Now, my fudge was always close <\/em>to perfect — just on the grainy side.\u00c2\u00a0 But isn’t it just possible that margarine didn’t quite <\/em>blend right with the sugar\/milk mixture and melted and rehardened just a little grainy, as opposed to how yesterday’s batch did, all fudgy and, well, buttery and smooth and absolutely perfect.<\/p>\n I’m sure my mother would have let me buy butter for making fudge if the idea had ever entered my head.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t even think I liked butter and never would have dreamed of using butter.\u00c2\u00a0 My housemate in college, Karen Tullsen, introduced the idea of using butter in baking, since she never did anything else.\u00c2\u00a0 Then my husband persisted in using butter when making his traditional Sunday morning pancakes with our boys, despite my complaints about the smell.\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually, believe it or not, I grew to like it, even the smell.<\/p>\n And, truth to tell, margarine over the years has grown to look more like “spread” and less and less like butter and I have changed to where I would never use anything else in my baking.<\/p>\n I do feel sorry for my child self.\u00c2\u00a0 All that work.\u00c2\u00a0 All that agonizing over whether the sugar was completely dissolved, when a simple change to using real butter would have solved the problem!<\/p>\n There are all kinds of simplistic sermon illustrations out of that, but I will refrain, I think.<\/p>\n On the good side, I am pleased that now I am much more confident that this batch of perfect fudge was not a strange, irreproducible fluke that will live in time as a legend.\u00c2\u00a0 The perfect fudge that I supposedly made on Thanksgiving Day when I was all alone but that no one else ever tasted.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I feel confident that I could do it again.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n So I do not have to worry if there doesn’t happen to be any left when my son returns on Sunday night.\u00c2\u00a0 I will simply have to make another batch.<\/p>\n What can I say?\u00c2\u00a0 I am shut up in the house alone with a pan of my favorite fudge, and it is absolutely perfect.<\/p>\n I should also add that I am third of thirteen children and I never did learn self-control regarding sweets.\u00c2\u00a0 If there are sweets around and you do not eat them now, you will probably not get any.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n And my goodness that fudge tastes good!<\/p>\n And although my headache still is not precisely gone, it is not worse, so at least the fudge is not making me sick, right?<\/p>\n Can you tell that I am not even trying <\/em>to fight it?\u00c2\u00a0 Will you despise me utterly if I confess that a part of the reason <\/em>I made fudge on Thanksgiving Day was that I knew that I would be alone in the house for the next three days and would get to eat it up all by myself?<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 If you are tempted to judge me too harshly, chalk it up to the fact that I can safely say that\u00c2\u00a0not once <\/em>when I made fudge as a child did I ever get to eat even half of the fudge myself.\u00c2\u00a0(No\u00c2\u00a0wonder I\u00c2\u00a0“tested” so much of it while cooking!) \u00c2\u00a0That must have been a little fantasy indulgence right there.<\/p>\n I’m hoping for a writing blitz today — alternating with reviews and writing on my NaNoWriMo novel.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m hoping the headache will stay subdued enough to allow for that.\u00c2\u00a0 Wish me luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night, as I was getting in bed, it dawned on me.\u00c2\u00a0 Real butter.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s why the fudge I made yesterday was absolutely perfect, melt-in-your-mouth, delicious.\u00c2\u00a0 Hmm.\u00c2\u00a0 Was it really? Yep. Perfect. Definitely much better than\u00c2\u00a0ANY of the fifty or so times I made it as a child. How is it better?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, it’s creamier, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanowrimo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}