Guest Author - Deborah Markus

I'm a chocolate writer because chocolate is an essential part of my life. I read about it, write about it, think about it, devour it, and though I never thought of myself as a food writer before I started working here, I've been inspired to come up with original recipes just by looking at a dish I enjoy and thinking, "What if I added chocolate to that?" (Note to aspiring food writers: This doesn't work all the time, or even most of the time. Chocolate with macaroni and cheese, for instance, is absolutely off limits.)

When I was young, I had a summer job behind the counter at a chocolate shop that made a lot of its own wares. I was in heaven. I measured and melted and dipped. And I made fudge.

I made twenty-pound batches of fudge, in a huge witch's cauldron of a pot and a stirring spoon the size of a shovel. The shop was set up so that people could watch us working, and I have never felt so famous as I did when I poured a vat of molten chocolate onto a marble table about the size of my kitchen and labored to turn the rapidly-cooling goo into the biggest batch of finished fudge in the world, ready to be chopped into chunks.

Though I loved the work, I felt guilty. I felt like a fraud. Because I could make these giant batches of fudge at work -- but I couldn't go home and make a single pound of fudge for private consumption. I could make brownies and cakes and truffles and mousse -- but not fudge.

I tried once or twice. The constant anxious monitoring of temperature and texture, none of which was part of the process for those huge batches I made at work, threw me off completely. One batch I burned beyond repair. One was repulsively gritty.

My cooking thermometer, which was made of glass and very temperamental, broke the next time I tried to make fudge, and I took it as a sign that this relationship was never meant to be.

I have somewhat reconciled myself to the idea that I'll never really master making fudge, but I'm not happy about it, because the best fudge is homemade and I don't currently know anyone who makes his or her own fudge.

So when I saw Canterbury Naturals Fudge Mix on the shelf of my local health food store, I was ready to give it a try. Their merchandise is very attractive -- the labels manage to look homey and elegant all at once.

Reading the list of ingredients was reassuring, too. Real food, all of it: sugar, cocoa, oil, cornstarch, salt.

I bought a box and brought it home to give it a try. The label says that it's a microwave fudge mix, but it has stovetop directions and I followed them instead. I wanted to feel as if I'd really cooked some fudge myself, sort of.

You need butter and milk to prepare the mix. To make it on the stove, you melt the butter and then stir in the mix. Supposedly. In fact, there is no way of stirring fourteen ounces of powder into six tablespoons of liquid. Toward the end, I contented myself with just dampening the mix -- there was no way to really incorporate it until I whisked in the milk.

I was able to throw all this together in a few minutes and put it in the refrigerator to cool while I made dinner. By the time we were done eating, the fudge was solid enough to eat, though it was better the next day.

My son's sweet tooth is not as intense as mine, and he tried a bit of the fudge but politely declined a second piece, saying that it tasted "too cocoa-ee." (There's really no good way of spelling that.) I didn't think it tasted of cocoa at all, except in the sense of having a rich chocolate flavor. To me, it tasted how fudge should: like solid chocolate sauce.

I'm glad I tried it, and I'll probably be buying it again. I like being able to mix up a batch of fudge that contains real food ingredients and doesn't involve destroying either my kitchen or what's left of my patience.

I think I might be up for trying to make fudge from scratch again, though; so if anyone has a recipe they swear by, I'd love to see it. I'll even buy another kitchen thermometer for the occasion.