Welcome to 2008!

Here's to a new year, hopefully, with many more Joys of Cooking posts.
To kick it off, this week, I made Peanut Butter Fudge, p 864.

I was flipping through the book, and came across the candies. I think it's amazing that there's a cookbook that has recipes for everything in it.

And there's something so appealing, so wholesome and frugal-seeming, about making one's own candy. "I do enjoy a sweet now and then, so I make an occasional batch of fudge/toffee/brittle/taffy to keep on hand." seems so much nicer than "I was starved for something sweet so I went to CVS and bought a giant bag of candy."

I chose Peanut Butter Fudge because it's one of the few candy recipes, and the only fudge recipe, that doesn't require a candy thermometer and close attention to candy-chemistry.
As it turns out, that attractive simplicity might reveal itself crudely in the finished product.

You should know that the ingredients are just: butter (a lot), peanut butter (a lot), and confectioner's sugar (a whopping 4½ cups), and a touch of vanilla.
So I guess it's not completely shocking that when you have a piece of this, it tastes like you're eating peanut butter supersaturated with fat and sugar...

I decided the real name of this fudge should be Rot Your Teeth Make You Fat Fudge.
The first taste experience was a bit repulsive. I could feel the sugar going straight into my teeth, and eating the enamel faster than I was eating the fudge--I felt a heavy sweetness unlike anything else. ...Then strangely, it seemed like a fine idea to have a second taste.

When all's said and done, making one's own candy and confections is not at all frugal. Tallying up the butter and peanut butter and sugar and vanilla puts this recipe at about $5.50. Not terrible--but certainly not cheap.

The enormous amounts of ingredients yielded an enormous amount of candy.
64 1x1" pieces. Although 1x1", each piece is nearly 2" deep.

I was faced with the problem of what to do with a huge excess of not-great peanut butter fudge... My primary thought was to send it out to P&C and T, to share the year's opening recipe...too bad it's so heavy that postage would probably be a million dollars. I also thought of sending it to Holland. ...but that would be a million and a half dollars, and would be month-old-fudge upon arrival.

So, I hid it in my refrigerator for a few days, a bit embarrassed that I had much more peanut butter fudge than I knew what to do with, and not enough confidence in it to give it away, until in conversation, I found a few willing fudge recipients--in fact, they begged.

Today I packaged it up and delivered it--and it was well-received.

A cellular text transmission reported: Fudge is Fabulous! Thank You!
That made me feel better.

Notes:

It was very dense and crumbly. The crumbling made it a little maddening to cut; the desire for smooth and perfect squares was unfulfilled. I have a sense that fudge is dense, by nature. However, the crumblyness might have been due to too much powdered sugar. I wondered, after the fact, whether I shouldn't have trusted my old Joy of Cooking knowledge from childhood, and re-measured the sugar after sifting... I was too lazy to do that, and figured it couldn't make that much of a difference. But I wonder if it did. I also used natural peanut butter--with no extra things aside from peanuts and salt; so I wonder if that might have had something to do with the slightly dry and crumbly nature of this batch. If I were to try it again, I would try a little less peanut butter and would re-measure the sugar after sifting.

It was quite easy.

It was not cheap.

It was well-received and, in fact, loved by those to whom I gave it. So the cringe-feeling I had, tasting it, might be only experienced by the maker, who cannot separate the candy from the knowledge that somewhere within the candy lies an ungodly amount of butter and sugar. People who receive the candy as a gift, merely taste a sweet decadent peanut butter fudge--and probably, in their enviable naïveté, feel up to several more pieces.

It might be a nice thing to make around Christmas time, for presents.

It did make me think about how great a treat it would have been in Little House times--like, I can picture Laura and Mary each getting a piece for Christmas and about five pages would be devoted to describing how extraordinary it was to get a piece of fudge. Did they have peanut butter in the midwest in the mid-19^th century?