Variations on a fudge

I did some fudge experimentation this weekend. I had a kids' party to go to (my friend's little boy turned three) so that was a perfect excuse to make sweet stuff.

Here we have a double batch of chocolate fudge and single batches of coffee and vanilla, I took these to the party:


And here are green tea, more vanilla, and a different coffee fudge. I'm taking these to work tomorrow:


They are all variations of the Edmond's Cookbook recipe I gave here.

In the batch of chocolate fudge I doubled the cocoa, making some of it normal cocoa and some of it Dutch. For all of the non-chocolate fudges I omitted cocoa, obviously.

To make vanilla fudge I replaced it with 1 good teaspoon of vanilla paste.

The green tea one has a dessertspoon of green tea powder, but I think it may have been better with slightly less. I'm not totally convinced about green tea as a flavouring in very sweet things.

I tried two ways of making coffee fudge. In one, I infused about 2 tbsp espresso-grind coffee into 1/2 cup of hot milk and and used that instead of the milk in the original recipe. It was nice, but could have been stronger. The other I just used 1 tbsp of freeze dried espresso powder instead of the cocoa in the original recipe - that one was a bit TOO strong. And instant-coffee-ish tasting. Still perfectly nice though.

The vanilla fudge I took to the party disappeared in no time flat and drew recipe queries from the grown-ups. A sure sign of success.