[Radio] Fudge Recipe | Delicious vanilla fudge

There’s just about enough time left for you to make this wonderful vanilla fudge before Valentine’s Day. Trust me – make these and wrap them up with a little bow and you will be a Valentine’s hero. I made them yesterday on my BBC Radio Show and they were fabulous.

I’ll be honest, unusually for this blog, these are very much a grown up recipe to make. The sugar/butter/milk mix gets very hot and I certainly wouldn’t consider letting Archie anywhere near the boiling saucepan. He didn’t care – and was only too happy to eat the finished product!

This recipe will give you soft, melting, sweet and crumbly fudge. Perfect for Valentine’s Day – or any other day for that matter – when only a decadent little sweet treat will do. Better still, you can make them from ingredients which you will more than likely have in your fridge and cupboards. Even if you don’t have the condensed milk, I reckon you can substitute it by doubling the milk quantity, especially if you are using full-fat milk.

In other news, Archie and I have been in the kitchen quite a bit this week, in amongst the chaos of our life with our little baby Matilda. I’ll be switching on the cameras very soon and posting a video on here imminently…

Listen to my full audio walk-through of the recipe here:

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Valentine’s Vanilla Fudge

Prep time 5 minutes

Cooking time 15 – 20 minutes

150ml full-fat or semi-skimmed milk
170g condensed milk
375-400g caster sugar
100g butter
Good drop of vanilla extract

Method:

Mix the sugar butter and milk in a saucepan and heat it all up until the butter has melted.

The mixture after 5 minutes

Once the mixture has come to the boil, you will need to cook it for 15-20 minutes until it reaches the soft ball stage, 115C on a cooking thermometer. There is sadly no substitute for using a thermometer, it is very tricky to cook the fudge just by “eye”. I use a cheap £3 thermometer from Amazon. If you really want to make this without a thermometer, stop cooking the mixture once it has reached a cheese fondu consistency and has changed from its initial insipid yellow colour to the golden colour you would expect fudge to be. This will be after somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes.

Make sure you keep stirring all the time or else the fudge mixture may burn or stick. You will nonetheless get flecks of the mixture sticking to the base of the pan. Just stir these in well as they will help colour the fudge.

10 minutes of boiling and stiring...

When the mixture reaches 115C, stir in the vanilla extract and leave it to rest for about 5 minutes.

15 minutes - at 115C, soft ball stage

Give the mixture another really good stir and spoon it into a lightly oiled cake tin.

Spread in the baking tin

Leave it to set at room temperature then cut the fudge up into small squares and enjoy.

The fudge keeps for quite a few days in an airtight container – not that it will last that long!