Creamy Chocolate Fudge
I don’t know what got me on a candy kick, but I have sweets on the brain lately. This fudge is chocolate-y, creamy—and entirely too easy to eat.
If you have friends in far-flung places, wrap it up tightly and send a little love. It ships really well.
Creamy Chocolate Fudge, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap then wax paper
Creamy Chocolate Fudge: A note on selecting chocolate
I love this fudge made with regular, unsweetened Baker’s Chocolate.
By all means, use any chocolate you like. Just be sure that it’s unsweetened.
Creamy Chocolate Fudge
3 cups sugar
8 Tbls. butter
1 cup light cream
pinch of salt
4 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped roughly
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
a little more butter to coat the pan
Makes about 1.5 lbs. of fudge
Creamy Chocolate Fudge: Prep the pan & chocolate
Generously butter an 8 inch x 8 inch glass pan. Set it aside.
Roughly chop the chocolate up. I usually use my serrated bread knife to do this. It works really well.
Creamy Chocolate Fudge: Melt the ingredients
Combine the sugar, butter, salt, and chocolate in a medium-sized pan.
Pour in the cream.
Give it a good stir to break the sugar up and mix the ingredients together.
Set it on the stove over medium heat. Stir constantly as your ingredients begin to melt. Keep stirring until the mixture boils.
The ingredients should melt together completely before the mixture starts to boil. Keep stirring.
Creamy Chocolate Fudge: Boil the mixture to soft-ball stage
When the mixture begins to boil around the edges, stop stirring. Leave the heat on medium.
Clip your candy thermometer to the inside of the pot. (Be sure that it’s not touching the bottom of the pot.)
Cook the fudge like this for about 10 minutes, without stirring.
It will come to a rolling boil and should stay there.
Boil like this until the mixture reaches soft-ball stage on your candy thermometer. This will take about 10 minutes or so.
Creamy Chocolate Fudge: Cool and beat the fudge
When it reaches soft-ball stage, it should look about like this. Remove the pan from heat.
Let it sit until it cools to about 120 degrees.
It will have a slight skin on it as it cools. That’s just fine.
When the fudge has cooled to 120 degrees, tranfer it to the bowl of your stand mixer (or a large mixing bowl if you’re using a hand-held mixer).
Beat it for a few minutes. It will start to thicken and begin to lose its gloss.
When the mixture starts to thicken, toss in the vanilla extract.
Keep beating the fudge until it loses its gloss completely.
Wait…loses its gloss? What do you mean?
Don’t stop beating the fudge until it looks about like this:
Creamy Chocolate Fudge: Cool the fudge completely in the pan
Turn the beaten fudge out into your prepared, buttered pan.
With your hands (or the back of a wooden spoon), pat the fudge down to spread it out. You want to make it as compact as you can, and smoosh any air pockets out of it.
You want the surface to be fairly flat and even, like this. Don’t make yourself nuts. The main reason to make it even is to make it easier to cut pieces that are the same size.
Cool completely in the pan, uncovered. When the fudge is cool, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and store it in a cool place.
Enjoy!
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17 Comments
Mmmmm, fudge. I love fudge. In a way I’m glad my girlfriend doesn’t like it, it forces me to regulate the amount of it that I eat.
Thanks, Bob!
+Jessie
I love chocolate, and this is only making me crave for more!
Hehehe, thanks, Jessie!
Fudge is so funny because I truly discover that my eyes are larger than my stomach….I always want to eat so much, but it is so rich and delicious!
Oh, too true! That said, I’m kind of a chronic nibbler with stuff like this. A little now. A little more in an hour, etc.
+Jessie
this looks wonderful and easy. I have found there is a technique to making fudge.I think I can follow this.
Thanks, Bunny.
There’s totally a technique to making most fudge. (Boil, cool, beat, cool completely.) A stand mixer or an electric mixer makes it so much easier than beating it by hand.
+Jessie
This looks so good. It reminds me that I loved chocolate fudge and popcorn on Saturday nights when we were kids. Loved the salty sweet mixture. Yummy! I am just not that good at candy making myself though.
I am really loving the texture of your fudge and the great step-by-step photo tutorial. If I didn’t know better, I’d eat the screen–the pics are fantastic!
What a wonderful tutorial! Thank you very much – I’m definitely going to try this. Celia
I am trying to make fudge for a friend’s wedding, and have been looking for recipes to test. I found this recipe and was so excited because it looked so straightforward and detailed, but I still have somehow managed to screw it up! I followed exactly but used cane sugar instead of white–would that have done it?
Or maybe it was my thermometer? I had to boil it for a long time. About 30 minutes and it still wasn’t reaching soft ball, according to my candy thermometer (and it didn’t look like yours either). I let it cool and it took forever. Once it got to 120 it was very hard to take out of the pot and my beaters were too weak to beat it, as it was already quite thick, so my husband stirred it quickly with a wooden spoon until the sheen started to dull. But then all of a sudden it turned into a crumbly, powdery mixture!
Do you think my candy thermometer was off and I way overcooked it? Seems like it reduced too much or something. I am a total fudge novice, so any ideas you might have on what I did wrong would be very helpful. Thanks!
Oh gosh, I’m almost positive it was the cane sugar! Definitely give it a try again with white sugar. (Cane sugar is unrefined, which basically means it still has molasses in it…so it’s going to behave very differently when you heat it.)
I’ll bet your thermometer is OK, but you could give it a quick temperature test by dipping it into a pot of plain, boiling water. Water boils at 212 degrees Farenheit. That way, you know it’s accurate.
I’d give it another shot with the white sugar. Let me know how it goes!!
+Jessie
Ahhhh. Thanks, Jessie! I feel so dumb for using cane sugar now–duh. Substituting it in baking may be one thing, but candy-making is a very different…kettle of candy.
I saw a recipe for fudge on 101 cookbooks that used it and so I thought it would be fine, but her recipe was totally different, had marshmallow stuff in it etc.
I will buy some white sugar and try it again this week and let you know how it goes. (And I’ll test my thermo first, just in case.) Meanwhile, I discovered the crumbly mixture I ended up with melts back down again quite nicely, so I think I’ll add some cocoa and make chocolate ice cream with it.
Thanks again!
Really great site by the way. I am now also eyeing the choco pudding…
Loved your step by step tutorial. Fudge looks delicious and divine. Great job!!
Love the industrial size and looks of this wicked good fudge! Also had a laugh at the banner right above the post title about loosing calories!
I love the fact that Jessie gives us the ways to sin but also repent after that – LOL
Gabi @Mamaliga
Jessie, thank you for this tutorial, it took me quite a few attempts (twelve) to get exactly what I wanted in the end, which was a slightly creamier fudge than yours. This was a great starting point and the photos really helped, thank you.
If it’s of interest, I wrote about my fudge experiments at length on my blog (feel free to delete this sentence – I’m not meaning to blogjack in any way).
For what it’s worth, I found that to achieve a silky smooth (rather than crumbly) fudge requires delicate handling and low temperatures, to ensure that all the sugar crystals really do dissolve and recrystalise in the smallest form possible.
Cheers, Celia