The world is burning. You surf on the heat wave, convinced that those dark winged shapes above you are not geese, but vultures. There is no way you are going within a mile of the oven. This puts you in a rather difficult position. You still need brain food. Glucose, even. Whatever shall you do?
You can make fudge. It isn’t too difficult- you barely have to touch it, and it’s delicious. All you need is cream, sugars (yes, more than one), and butter. Use any flavourings you want.
Use one cup of cream, two cups of the main sugar, and about half a cup of another kind of sugar. You can use whipped cream, or half-and-half. Do not use fake cream, because that is ridiculous and will taste like rubbish. You also need to use brown sugar for the main sugar; white sugar might work, but it will behave badly in the pan and might ruin the fudge. Your other sugar can be honey, maple syrup, white sugar, chocolate chips, guava… you get the drift. Don’t use table syrup, because that is not sugar but a mixture of fructose and hopelessness.
The second sugar helps prevent large crystals from forming, as its makeup is slightly different from that of the brown sugar, and keeps the mixture from becoming too homogenous.
Put all of the above ingredients into a frying pan. Turn on medium heat, and stir until it boils. Once it boils, stop stirring! Keep boiling until the mixture reaches 238° C. If you don’t have a convenient way of measuring this, you can use a glass of water: drop small spoonfuls of fudge into the glass. When the resulting piece of candy is chewy but soft, the fudge is ready. Pour the mixture into a greased bowl (Don’t scrape the bowl: it will encourage crystals to form, which will make your fudge hard), and vigorously stir in your flavourings. Use vanilla if you want a fairly simple, generic fudge. There are, of course, an infinite number of flavours you could try. Add in some of your favourite candy (unless they are Skittles; that will go very badly indeed). Nuts and little bits of dry fruit are also good.
Stir until the fudge is no longer shiny. No, I am not crazy: it will be quite shiny, but a little stirring will fix that. Well, a lot of stirring. Pour it into a pan lined with parchment paper and let it cool.
Share it with your friends; if it fails, share it with your enemies. Don’t eat too much. I mean it. It will be tempting. Be strong.
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