Here’s how a Chemical Engineer makes fudge. In fact this is special fudge. The author calls it Posse Fudge and comes from Wallowa County in the late ’70’s from some Chuck Wagon cook book. The recipe makes a Texas sized batch of fudge, so we cut the recipe in half. So here we go.

First find a nice sixteen ounce glass tumbler and fill it pretty well with eggnog. Splash in a generous gulump of golden rum and then sprinkle on a dash of nutmeg. This will lubricate the fudge stirring device. Now take out a generous sized pan and dig out your slide rule. The first ingredient is a seven ounce Hershey dark chocolate bar. Place the cursor over the 7 and slide the 2 under the line and read 3.489 ounces at the index. Our bar is 4 ounces, so slide the curser over to the 3.489 and slide the bar until 4 is under the curser. If the slide rule is stiff from long periods of no use, lubricate by having a good sheslug of the eggnog. Calculate that we need 18,375 squares of chocolate. Break up the bar and nibble 5/8ths off of one square. Place the 18 and 3/8ths chocolate squares in the bowl. The next ingredient is easy, two 4-ounce German Chocolate bars. Simply break the two bars in two and place half of each in the bowl and you get to eat the other halves. Celebrate with another good slurp of the eggnog. Next comes 24 ounces of chocolate chips. Use a precision balance to weigh ten chocolate chips. Calculate the average weight of a single chip and divide that into 12 ounces, (remember to convert the units if you are using a gram balance to weigh the sample of chips.) That will give you the number of chocolate chips to count out and place in the bowl. Be careful to not count the chocolate chips that you eat while you are counting. The next ingredient is a 16 ounce bag of miniature marshmallows. Have you ever noticed that these things no longer come in nice even ounce packages? Our package was 10.5 ounces. I counted the marshmallows in the bag. Divided by 10.5 and multiplied by 8. That worked out to 576.75 marshmallows. I bravely threw in 577 whole marshmallows. I figured the slight discrepancy would probably not be noticed in the finished product. Now we needed a 13 ounce jar of marshmallow crème.

Oops the eggnog is empty, time out while I refill it. Now where were I? Ah yes 13 ounces divided by two is 6.5 ounces and we have a 7 ounce jar to contend with. I spent several minutes sipping and contemplating several possibilities, like extruding the stuff from a cookie press onto wax paper and cutting off 13/14ths. The hard part was getting the wax paper back out of the fudge mixture. I finally adopted Admiral Farragut’s strategy of August 15, 1864 as he rallied his men with the famous quotation, “Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!” I scooped the whole seven ounces into the bowl.

Now here is were we ran into serious trouble. The recipe called for a 12 ounce can of evaporated milk. I had mistakenly picked up a 14 ounce can of sweetened condensed milk. We are miles to the nearest store and here is this bubbling mess of goo. With a stroke of brilliance I mixed three ounces of sweetened condensed milk with three ounces of sour cream. They should balance out perfectly.

Now place two cups granulated sugar, half a stick of butter and the milk mixture in a sauce pan. I boiled this stuff down until the candy thermometer reached 230 degrees. This hot frothing stuff goes over all the chocolate and marshmallowie stuff and you beat the whey out of it.

We slid it out into a buttered pan and started sampling. Posse Fudge has an interesting zing to it….hmmm.

Actually Judy was the cook, and I was just the stirring device. The fudge was delightful. We are now near Austin Texas. We expect to work our way down to Padre Island on the Gulf Coast of Texas right at the Mexican border by Christmas. We are still searching for warm weather. There was ice on the awning when I rolled it in this morning. Brrr…. The mid day temperature almost made it to 60 today. Normal is 65.

Once again we wish you Merry Christmas.

With love, Gary and Judy.