sigelphoenix

I had a half-pint of heavy cream I needed to get rid of, so I did a little hunting and came up with this recipe for fudge:

     2 cups granulated sugar
     1 cup heavy cream
     2 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped
     1 tablespoon butter
     1/2 lb marshmallows

Combine sugar and cream and cook over moderate heat. When this becomes very hot, add the chocolate. Stir constantly. Cook until mixture reaches soft-ball stage (238 degrees). Remove from heat and add butter and marshmallows. Mix until fudge starts to thicken. Transfer to a buttered tin. Cut into squares before fudge hardens completely.

As you can see, it's pretty vague, but I figured that it looked simple enough that I couldn't screw up, right?

Well ... no. See, "very hot" is not a clear cooking instruction, so I had to do some guesswork. Then, after I added the chocolate, I wanted to be careful not to burn it, so I put it on low heat and tried to stir it a lot. But I didn't know how long to stir it, because what in sweet heaven does "soft-ball stage" mean? Must the fudge congeal into a sphere the size of a softball? Should I heft it and see if it has the correct weight? Aerodynamic quality?

Thus, panicking, I went ahead and added in the marshmallows. But they wouldn't melt. Seriously, when have you known marshmallows to not melt at the slightest heat? Panicking again, I stuck the pot back on the stove, and ended up boiling the mixture as I tried to get the damn marshmallows to give in. All the while, I kept stirring.

Afterward, I did some searching, and it turns out that "soft-ball stage" means when you can drop a bit of the mixture into cold water and get a "soft ball." O_o Is that in any way an intuitive instruction? I didn't think so. Apparently this is just some well-known technique that all fudge makers must be familiar with. Or is it some innate knowledge about cooking that I should know as a woman? Did I fail somehow? Is this because I'm a whore who uses frozen??

Also, there are apparently points in the cooking process at which you Absolutely Must Not Stir the Fudge. Whoops.

So, in the end, I have this weird goopy substance of the consistency of chocolatey marshmallow cream. Or taffy. It won't allow itself to be cut into pieces - or, rather, I can cut it, but then it reforms into a whole in a process that makes me suspect sentience - so now I have some globs of would-be fudge in some tupperware containers. Making softballs out of it might not be a bad idea.