oh divine fudge

Our cousin got married recently, and I was responsible for the task of making some sweet treats to enjoy with coffee. I made little lemon meringue tarts like those served at Daisy's birthday party using the recipe from A Treasury Of NZ Baking. The pastry and curd recipe from Kathy Paterson are fabulous and work every time. I use the Edmonds meringue recipe (2 egg whites to 1/2 c caster sugar) pipe them onto trays and bake until dry, to pop onto the tarts once ready to be served. I love these tarts, and make them quite regularly for catering jobs. They are a bit fiddly to make, having the three components of pastry, lemon curd and meringues, but are perfectly easy to make in bulk, and look so sweet. Best of all, everything can be made a few days ahead and easily assembled at the last minute.

I also made a few batches of Cottle Fudge, having tasted it when our friend Chloe made it. The recipe can be found on the Ruth Pretty website, and it is divine. Libby and I think that taste and texture-wise it reminds us a lot of the Viennese/Classic/Country fudge in the Cadbury Rose's boxes. (These are a favourite, so we consider this a compliment!)

Ruth's instructions may seem a little pedantic about cooling times etc but do follow them to the letter if you want to be able to cut your fudge into perfect little squares without the chocolate cracking. I was unhappy with how messily one batch of mine sliced, after I lazily left it in the fridge overnight to set the chocolate on a humid night. But I chipped the chocolate topping off, melted the fudge down in the pan again and repoured it into the tin, melting some new chocolate to top it after the requisite cooling time had passed; luckily this worked perfectly as a remedial measure as by that stage I was a bit over making Cottle fudge!

Ruth says she gets 56 pieces out of a tray, I used a 20cm square pan and trimmed the edges (yum, offcuts) then cut the fudge slab into 8 x 8 rows, which yielded 64 smaller bite sized pieces. It is sweet, so I think a daintier piece is a little less intimidating than those in the picture above which I found on her website - the good fudge was whipped off to the wedding and ours at home was the '2nds' so was not worthy of photographing - but most definitely worthy of being devoured, did I mention this fudge is very moreish?!

It really is divine, the texture is melt-in-your mouth creamy without the sugary graininess homemade fudge often has, or the waxiness commercial fudge can suffer from. Easy to make too, as for something considered child's play making perfect fudge is actually rather tricky. The dark chocolate on top is essential, and it needs to be something really dark like Whittakers Ghana to cut through the sweet fudge. I think a sprinkle of flaky seasalt on top would also work well if you are on the sweet-salty bandwagon that is popular at the moment.