Grandma's Fudge: Whoopsie Edition

     Yesterday I was given a special task from Jen: make my Grandma's fudge. She was having a hankerin' for it, and I thought it would be fun to see if I could do it. 

     See, the problem here is that my Grandma's fudge barely even has what could qualify as a recipe. It's one of those "summa this, summa that" type deals. So because of that, it's not a good recipe for beginners. Although, on the other hand, it kind of is a good recipe for beginners because even if you screw it up, hey, you just made chocolate goo, and maybe that's not what you were shooting for but damn if doesn't taste good. Unless you burn it. God help you if you burn it. But we'll get to that. First let's take a look at the original recipe. 

     Ok, so we've got the basics, anyway. But first! You'll notice it has "milk" listed as an ingredient, but what it should say is evaporated milk, and don't bother measuring it, just get a little can of it. I'm not just making that up, my grandma always used evaporated milk too. I remembered watching her use a little can of milk, but I couldn't remember if it was sweetened condensed milk or evaporated milk. I went with the former and immediately realized it was the wrong choice, but I just added some milk to make a nice thick liquid texture, and it turned out just fine. But I'm getting ahead of myself again! 

     So you take your evaporated milk, your sugar, and your cocoa, and plop 'em into a pan and cook on low to low-medium (is that a thing? Let's pretend it's a thing) until it thickens. If you're like me and you accidentally used sweetened condensed milk, you'll get a weird gritty thick paste, so throw in about 3/4 cup of regular milk and stir it up, and it'll be ok. Now this part is important: stir. Constantly. This is not a recipe that you can throw on the stove and walk away from for a minute. You do have to stir it, literally, constantly. It's not bad though, because you'll only need to cook it for ten to fifteen minutes before it gets thickened to the soft ball stage. My grandma always used the candy-making method of dropping a smidge of the fudge into a cup of cool water and seeing if it turns into a soft ball; when it does, it's just about ready. I prefer to just go by intuition: when you're stirring the fudge and you notice it filling back in on itself following the spatula nice and slowly, like a lava flow. Because I know the hardest part of this recipe is figuring out when it's thickened enough, here's a little gif I threw together so you can see what it ought to look like when it's ready. 

     When it looks like that, it's time to add your power-up ingredients: butter, vanilla, and peanut butter, unless you don't like peanut butter (GET OUT. Just kidding, you can stay while I judge you from afar) or have allergies. The recipe just says "add vanilla and butter." OKAY GRANDMA. Just add it. Some. A lot. Whatever. I used about three tablespoons...ish of butter, a teaspoon or so of vanilla (that's just what was left in the bottle, real talk), and probably close to a cup of peanut butter, because I really like peanut butter, like, a lot. Just add all that in and let it melt in with the pan off the eye, no stirring necessary. Once everything's melted, give it a quick stir to get it all together, then it's pan time! Pour it into a brownie pan and let it chill and set into solid form. Try to resist the urge to lick the spatula and burn your mouth to ashes with boiling chocolate napalm. 

     Once it's set, slice it into bite-sized pieces and enjoy! At the end of all of this, I ended up deciding the sweetened condensed milk debacle was a delicious mistake, because it gave the fudge a sort of caramel-y taste. So it all worked out in the end! 

Amanda's Favorite Cookies

     This post is exactly what it claims to be: the recipe for Amanda's favorite cookies. I don't make them that often because I prefer drop cookies to cutout cookies, but sometimes she gets to pestering me about it and won't stop until I make them. So I figured I'd share them with you! They're kind of a strange cookie: chocolatey through and through, but very light and flaky in texture, almost closer to a pastry than a cookie. 

     The original recipe is out of a book my friend Elise gave me once (it's this one right here, if you're curious). They're called "pressed chocolate cookies" in the book, but I always call them chocolate envelopes, because that's more descriptive. Read on and I'll show you how I make them! 

     First up, gather your ingredients. 

     You'll need:

     1 1/3 cups flour
     2 tablespoons cocoa powder
     2/3 cup softened butter
     3/4 cup sugar
     1 egg yolk
     chocolate discs, chunks, or whatever else you want to cram inside the cookies

     First up, preheat the oven to 375 degrees, and grease a baking sheet with butter or cooking spray. Then mix the flour and cocoa together in a medium bowl. In another bowl, a large one this time, beat together the sugar and butter, then add in the egg yolk and beat some more. When it's all combined, add the dry ingredients from the medium bowl to the large bowl and beat until everything is nicely mixed up. The dough will look really crumbly. Like this!  

     Now, the original recipe says to refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, but I think they put that in there just to screw with everybody. Don't do that. This dough is so crumbly and dry that if you chill it, it will never, ever roll out without cracking apart. You have to do the opposite and warm it up a bit by kneading it and squishing it with your hands until it starts to hold together. Once it holds its shape, throw down some flour and start rolling it out. It's very important to also flour your rolling pin, because the dough can start to pull up and tear if you're not very gentle with it. It's kind of a pain in the tush, but suffering makes the cookies taste better. Once the dough is rolled out pretty thin (1/8 of an inch if you can get it there, thicker if you get tired of rolling and decide where it's at is good enough), cut a whole bunch of circles out with the cookie cutter/glass of your choice. I use a little biscuit cutter. 

See how the dough stuck to the counter a little in the missing cookie's spot? Flour, flour, flour your surfaces, friends. Don't be like me! 

     Once they're all cut out, it's assembly time! Just place your chocolate disc (or whatever else you're using) in the center, put another cut-out on top, then press the edges together with a fork to seal them. 

     Plop 'em on the prepared baking sheet and bake them for about 8 minutes. I always start with 7 and then keep a close eye on them, because I like my cookies to essentially just be heated-up dough, but if you like a crisper cookie, let them go a little longer. When they've spread out just a bit and the edges start to set, take them out and let them cool on a wire rack. They'll still seem a little underdone when you first take them out, but they'll continue to set juuuuust enough while they cool, which is what makes their divinely odd gooey-but-kind-of-crispy texture. 

     Then they're done! Enjoy them while you can, because a batch only makes about a dozen, so they go fast.