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Sam--Could you taste the pumpkin in the fudge?
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Yeah, definitely. I think the pumpkin might have been the cause of my first two failures. (And believe me, they WERE failures. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] )
The first one burnt to a crisp. Maybe it was the pumpkin, or maybe that the heat was too intense, so it got too hot too quickly. The second batch I tried only using medium heat, but it started charring too, so I stopped it early. Instead of the gritty charcoal above, I got this sorta roasted jelly. Like black pumpkin snot! Yum!
Then I figured maybe the thermometer wasn't reading right. There's a little gap below the glass, so maybe with a big pot, the fudge didn't go high enough on the thermometer to register? Could the nastiness above be caused by way too high heat? Anyway, when I got a THIRD pot, this one much smaller, the liquid came up higher, and everything worked. There was still a bunch burnt to the bottom of the pan, but at least I got some actual fudge.
Anybody have experience with making fudge? Or candy in general? Is the last step always scrubbing the pan for hours?