NuttyTart

Mageirocophilia

Chocolate & Honey Fudge

Chocolate and Honey FudgeAh, fudge. Sweet creamy goodness. I love eating it, and I love making it – it’s always a wonderful thrill of success when you cut into it and it turned out the way it should. Hurrah! For the longest time, I routinely ruined my fudge and it never set (but was still perfectly wonderful to eat – you just needed a spoon). Turned out my problem was impatience: you cannot bring the mixture into boil quickly, nor can you boil at it full heat. Slow and easy, at medium heat, does it!

 

Anyway! I chose this particular recipe because it contains honey – which is the special ingredient of this month’s We Should Cocoa challenge by Choclette and Chele, hosted this time by Choclette at the Chocolate Log Blog. Honey does add a special something to the taste of this chocolate fudge, and you can taste it even through all that sugar! Because the recipe is so sugar-heavy (it’s fudge, after all), I would definitely recommend a very dark, high cocoa chocolate for this. I found the recipe online, but it reportedly comes from The Complete Home Confectioner by Hilary Walden.

 

Chocolate & Honey Fudge

 

450 g sugar
150 ml milk
100 g chocolate, chopped (high quality & high cocoa – I used 85% Lindt)
150 g unsalted butter, chopped
50 g clear honey
3 -5 drops vanilla extract


Butter or oil a 7″ or 8″ square pan. This size is not critical to the recipe, but will determine how thick and deep your fudge will be.

Place milk and sugar in a heavy, large saucepan (it must be able to contain 4 times the volume of the original ingredients to avoid boiling over).  Stir over medium heat with a wooden spoon until the sugar has dissolved.

Add chopped chocolate, chopped butter and honey. Stir the mixture until fully melted and blended together.

Bring slowly to a boil. Cover and boil for 3 minutes (this helps wash down the sugar crystals from the sides of the saucepan).

Uncover and insert a prewarmed sugar thermometer. Boil until soft ball stage (116C/240F).

Once the mixture has reached the soft ball stage, remove the saucepan from heat and plunge the base of the pan into an ice water bath. Wait for the temperature to reach 50C/122°F.

Add vanilla essence (and any additions you like – nuts, dried fruit…) and beat the mixture with a wooden spoon until it becomes thick, creamy and lighter in colour.

Pour mixture into prepared pan and leave until almost set. Mark out squares with an oiled knife and leave to set.

Keeps, theoretically speaking, 3-4 weeks.


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Pesto, Sun-Dried Tomato and Mozzarella Rolls

Pesto, sun-dried tomato & mozzarella rollsLovely, stuffed bread rolls that I’ve been making for over a decade, but never posted the recipe anywhere, because I find it so difficult to put into words how the bread rolls are to be slit!! It’s not complicated in the least, but for me, the 3D world and its representations are apparently very challenging…. Anyway, these are delicious. I’m forever grateful to the friend of a friend who served these to my friend, who in turn introduced me to them. All clear? Good. Now onto explaining how to stuff part baked bread rolls with Mediterranean goodness.


Pesto, Sun-Dried Tomato and Mozzarella Rolls


4 part baked bread rolls
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 teaspoons pesto
2 sun-dried tomatoes, packed in oil
125 g fresh mozzarella
(All ingredient amounts are subject to personal taste)


Combine olive oil and minced garlic. Chop sun-dried tomatoes. Slice mozzarella.
Preheat oven to the temperature specified on your bread roll package.
Place bread rolls on a cookie sheet and slit the tops open lengthwise, about halfway through each roll. (Okay? Hmm. I hope the picture helps.)
Bake bread rolls for about half of the time indicated on the package – the rolls I use need to be baked for 8-10 minutes, so I bake them for 4 minutes at this stage.
Take the rolls out of the oven and work quickly to stuff them: first, brush the insides of the rolls with garlic oil, then fill the rolls with pesto, chopped sun-dried tomatoes and mozzarella slices. The rolls are not overly hot yet, so you should be able to do all this with your bare hands, even if you don’t have hands of the asbestos variety (like Nigella).
Return rolls into the oven and bake for however long is left (4-6 minutes for me).
Eat. Be happy.


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