First of all, I decided to make fudge. All of the other women participating in the Swap are very experienced and accomplished chefs (even the ones who profess otherwise). There was no way that I was even going to try to compete with their cookies - so instead, I made fudge. Now, I have never made fudge before. But my mom makes killer fudge. In fact, it's so good that everyone calls it Million Dollar Fudge. It's my great-grandma's recipe and it is perfection. When we visited my parents for Thanksgiving, I asked my mom if we could make a batch as a trial run for the Cookie Swap. She agreed, and we made fudge. It was easy. It was delicious. As my mom will tell you, "This is a no-fail recipe!" We ate a few pieces that night and then packed the rest up to send home with me.
My mom agreed to make fudge with me even after cooking and cleaning up a whole Thanksgiving dinner. She's a good mom.
So on Monday night, when I planned to make my batch of fudge, I felt nothing but confidence. I had all of the ingredients and the recipe right in front of me. What could be easier than this? In fact, I got a little fancy and made two batches - one with nuts and one without (or as I like to say, a male batch and a female batch). I prepared the fudge and stuck it in the refrigerator to harden. While I didn't taste test the final product that night, I licked the bowl so I knew it was good.
Fast forward to last night.... The fudge has been sitting in my refrigerator for 72 hours waiting to be cut into small pieces and put into a festive container. When I got home from work, I took the fudge out of the refrigerator and proceeded to attempted to cut it into pieces. However, after 72 hours of sitting in my refrigerator, the fudge, my mom's NO-FAIL fudge, had not hardened. It was a gooey mess - a delicious gooey mess, but still a mess.
I started to get hot all over and my armpits started to sweat. There was no way that I could take this fudge to the Swap. Instantly, several potential scenarios came to mind.
1. I could stick the fudge in the freezer and hope that it would harden in time.
2. I could make up an excuse not to go.
3. I could stop by the bakery on the way there and pick up something that was actually edible.
What I finally ended up doing was packing up the fudge that my mom and I had made the week before. I had just enough pieces left.
The cookie swap was a success. Our gracious host's home was spectacularly decorated. The confections were divine. No one knew of the drama that had occurred a mere 90 minutes earlier. While I still have my 50¢ fudge in the freezer, I think my mom's Million Dollar Fudge was a hit.
