The Big Rock Candy Mountain

In this photo: the Dancing Girls and their trusty steeds, and their friends the Crittergators, discover an amazing mountain of fudge!

Featuring: Grandma Colyer's peanut butter fudge.

My mother makes some of the best fudge I've ever eaten in my life. Both her peanut butter fudge and her million dollar (chocolate) fudge are family treats that we all look forward to, and even compete for. These days, such treats may be available once or twice a year, usually only at holidays.

For the past few months, my husband has been begging me to make fudge. Yes, I have both my mother's recipes. I may have made fudge once or twice before in my whole life. I have a vague feeling of having done it years and years ago, but not why or how.

I don't know where my mom's million dollar fudge recipe came from, but I do know where the peanut butter fudge recipe came from - my paternal grandmother, Grandma Colyer, a marvelous woman who is one of my life heroes, and who lived to be 94 years old.

And so in the past grocery shopping trip or two, I've picked up the ingredients to make both kinds of fudge. But I admit I was a little bit scared of trying it. I looked at the peanut butter fudge recipe and when I got to that part about waiting until it forms a soft ball in cold water, I went into a cold sweat.

Here, in its entirety, is the recipe itself, just as it was given to me:

Ingredients: 2 boxes confectioner sugar, 1 cup milk, 12 oz creamy peanut butter, 7 oz marshmallow creme.
Instructions: Cook confectioner sugar and milk until it forms a soft ball in cold water. Then add peanut butter and marshmallow creme and mix it up well. 

It sounds so easy, doesn't it? Just four ingredients. What could go wrong?

On Sunday afternoon, I finally mustered the courage to make the fudge. I had numerous questions. First off, I had bought a large bag of confectioner's sugar. How many ounces are in a BOX? (Answer, found online: about 16 ounces.)

Second, at what stove setting should I cook the confectioner sugar and milk, and for how long? (Answer: between about 5 and 6 on my stove top dial, and probably 15 to 20 minutes, or approximately until your arm falls off or you die of carpal tunnel, as you must STIR the mixture CONSTANTLY and be watchful of scorching! This is the part where you become a Prisoner of the Fudge.)

I kept a cup of very cold water nearby, occasionally dropping a spoonful of the mixture into it and watching intently to see if it might oblige me by forming soft balls in cold water, like it was supposed to. But alas, it never did.

And so I think the whole dropping "soft balls in cold water" bit may be a red herring. Stir that stuff till it gets kinda thick and bubbly, and do that for a while. Skip the whole worrying about the soft balls part; this is my only really useful advice about making fudge.

Then I stirred in the marshmallow creme and made a great big mess and got it all over my shirt AND on the stove, including on the burner, where it sat and steamed and smoked and smelled bad and made me worry that I was scorching the mixture in the pot, when in fact I was not!

And then I added the peanut butter and stirred and stirred. By then, it was in full sticky mode and resisted my efforts, but I kept stirring anyway. (Stir until your arm hurts! That's my advice! If you're not suffering, it's not fudge!) And I looked at the mixture and it was just too pale. So I added MORE peanut butter. And stirred some more until it looked about right.

Then, sensing I was nearing the finish line, I looked at the tiny pan I had sitting there, lightly oiled (nobody tells you this, but I did lightly grease the pan's bottom with vegetable oil). And I realized it was WAAAAAAY too tiny for all that fudge. So I got out the big lasagna pan (13 inches by 9 inches), and I oiled that sucker too. And then I dumped that big mess of fudge in it and beat it down with a spoon, for it had turned unruly on me, and resisted arrest.

Once the fudge had been subdued and was (seemingly) quietly resting in the pan, my job was done! All I had to do was clean up the great big mess I had made of myself and the kitchen. And let it cool before serving. And then cut it up and put it in containers for storage. VOILA! - FUDGE!

Of course, my husband's first question was how soon could we eat it. And I told him that at home, we were never really encouraged to eat the fudge until a day later. In fact, we were never ENCOURAGED to eat it at all. In fact, my mother, knowing what fudge thieves we six children all secretly were, generally HID the fudge in her and my dad's bedroom.

This is also, by the way, where they hid the whoopie pies, in a huge metal roasting pan my mom used for cooking chickens. But - ha! - we kids knew there was no chicken in there, just whoopie pies. And so we sneaked in and ate them any chance we got. But I digress. (By the way, have we ever discussed whoopie pies here? And the critical role they play in American cuisine? No? A topic for another day . . .)

And then my husband got the great idea that freezing the fudge would render it cool enough more quickly. And so he did that. And soon I heard happy moans from the chair next to me in the living room. And that's when I realized that I must have done it right!

The recipe does not tell you useful things like how big a pan to put it in, but I figured that out myself. It also does not tell you how much it makes. We weighed the fudge in the containers and it weighed in at just short of six pounds.

We ended up freezing some of it, refrigerating some, and leaving just two or three containers out for eating. My husband is now guarding the fudge with his life. "Somehow, I think of it as MY fudge," he told me smugly last evening, smiling broadly, licking fingers sticky with fudge. Gee, I guess I really DID do it right!

And hmm . . now that it is done, and cooled, the consistency of the fudge is very easy to work with and it has an interesting golden color, not unlike the shade of sand. I can think of a few other things I might like to use it for. In fact, I think it would make really great Pyramids at Giza. Now, I just wonder if I have any little camels lying around here . . .  ;-)

The song to accompany this image of my grandma's famous fudge is Harry McClintock, with Big Rock Candy Mountain, a 1928 folk song about a hobo's vision of paradise, from the O Brother Where Art Thou film soundtrack. I highly recommend both the soundtrack AND the movie, by the way.