No Fail Fudge

Yesterday was the last day of school for the kids before the Chrsitmas break. After a week of thinking to myself, I'll make the teacher's gifts tomorrow, I was down to one day left. I promised to drop off the packages at lunch so B & M could distribute them before they went outside for recess. We'd planned to make butterscotch candy and color half of it with black food coloring to make "coal" for some Naughty and Nice candy.

However, once the kids were on the bus, I couldn't find my recipe and realized that for the amount of candy I needed to make (enough for a goodly amount for 12: teachers, EAs, secretary, principal, bus driver...), I was going to need more than a morning anyways.

So I gave it a bit of thought and decided mother-in-law's No Fail Fudge recipe would be perfect. It has never failed me since she gave me the recipe. 4 batches would cover it nicely. I decided to boil up two at a time, and pour them into a sheet pan, since I don't have four 8" square cake pans. All done in 40 minutes - one sheet pan plus a bit in a loaf pan. Feeling very proud of myself, I got the little dishes and cellophane bags out, found some green yarn for tying it altogether and made some tags on the computer while the fudge cooled outside in the garage (-30 degrees C yesterday!)

After about an hour, I checked on the fudge which was now very cold, but unfortunately still quite gooey. It had failed. For about an hour an a half I occasionally poked it, hoping to find it's consistancy miraculously changed. I had lunch with hubby and expressed my utter frustration to him in a myriad of ways until he finally said, "If you keep shooting down all my suggestions, I'll stop making them." Admitting defeat, I drove him back to work, and headed to the school to tell my girl that I was going to let her down, that we had sludge - not fudge, and that I couldn't package it with spoons as it looked far to unappetizing.

Once home again, and still not quite willing to give up, I thought that maybe a different corner of the pan would have different chemical properties. Remember I made 4 separate batches? And what do you know! Only the batch belonging to the corner I had poked (and the bit in my loaf pan) had failed. All that frustration for nothing. I quickly cubed up the good parts, packaged them at lightning speed and raced off to school just as the kids were coming in from recess! Cries of "thank you, mommy, you're amazing" echoing in my ears, I went home, had a cup of tea and vowed to start on next year's teacher gifts in July.

And I finished a Happy Frog!