Rosalind Evans: Too much chocolate!?

Not possible I hear you cry! Well, I think I may have put a bit too much chocolate into my fudge as it is not really structurally strong enough to cut into lumps, it tends to fall apart! Perhaps then it is not a case of too much chocolate but of not enough everything else... It does taste great tho, so its not really a problem! I based it on the same recipe that I used last time for the vanilla fudge, only I left out the vanilla pod and replaced it with 200g of Bournville. The method is also the same, but you stir in the chocolate at the end instead of the vanilla. I was using my new sugar thermometer which has the various points you have to heat the sugar to already marked on it which makes it a lot easier to use. I chopped the chocolate up really small so that it would melt in easily to the hot sugar mixture, however I think that because I used a lot of chocolate (always a good thing) it lowered the temperature of the sugar mix a bit too quickly so it started to solidify really quickly and the chocolate didn't get totally incorporated which is why the finished fudge has a slightly swirly appearance and possibly why it crumbles quite so much... Next time I am going to try melting the chocolate before I stir it in so that the temp of the chocolate is similar to that of the sugar so it doesn't go solid quite so quickly and I don't have a mad panic trying to get it into the tin before it welds itself onto the bottom of the pan! My next experiment will also involve adding some instant espresso powder in make the flavour more chocolaty. In lots of my recipe books espresso powder is often added to chocolate cakes or puddings, as the coffee flavour helps to enhance the chocolate and make it less sweet and more intense. Another good reason to keep experimentng with fudge.