I did the hour-long tour of the Fudge Cottage kitchen this afternoon. There were about 11 of us on the tour, 9 adults and 2 kids. We met at the Fudge Cottage and our demonstrator took us through a circuitous route to get to the kitchen itself. Normally it was more accessible, she said, but the recent stron earthquake they had a couple of months ago rendered the part of the building with the normal doorway unsafe so while the kitchen itself was unaffected, they have to access it differently until the building is fixed.
The kitchen was fairly small with a glassed-in room called the cooking room. This is where the boiler sits and when we walked in, a vat of their "hokey pokey" fudge mixture was bubbling while being stirred with a giant mixer to keep it from getting too hot. In terms of fudge making, the steps were pretty much the same as anyone who makes homemade fudge - you heat the ingredients to boiling, stirring constantly to prevent burning, then once it's reached a certain temperature, they lift it off the heat, insert a thermometer and mix it some more to cool it. Part of the cooling mixing was done by hand by the fudge lady while our tour demonstrator gave us a talk about the fudge making process, the history of the Fudge Cottage and how it started and passed out samples of fudge.
The samples were cut small which was a good thing as there was quite of few of them. The Fudge Cottage has 20 recipes for fudge in their cookbook but only make 13 year-round. We sampled about 10. The texture of the fudge was a bit surprising to me - it wasn't the smooth creaminess I'm used to from something like See's fudge but was a bit more crumbly, although not grainy. They also had relatively few chocolate flavors that we sampled. Most of them were like penuche or brown sugar fudge.
After the fudge had cooled sufficiently, Lee, the person making it, and our tour person (sorry, I forgot her name), upended the huge bowl of hot hokey pokey fudge onto a rectangular table already set up with bits of hokey pokey (which is like aerated toffee, like in Australia's Violet Crumble) and smoothed it out in an even layer over the table.
Lee spackled the hot liquid fudge with a couple of spatulas to force out the air bubbles and make an even layer. She had to work quickly before the fudge set.
Then she scored the fudge with a metal template to score squares into the fudge and ran a rolling pin to cut the fudge into the rectangles they sell in the shop.
Some of the extra from the spatula she poured into a bowl and we got to sample the warm liquidy fudge. YUM. While I found the cooled pieces of fudge a bit crumbly, the liquid fudge was good. The hokey pokey fudge wasn't chocolate but when it was warm, it tasted similar to butterscotch but without being overly sweet. Our tour demontrator suggested if we want that kind of texture again, just warm up the fudge in the microwave. Yeah, I'm going to have to try that next time. The Fudge Cottage uses local ingredients for their fudge except for their chocolate (I forgot where she said they get that from) and their maple syrup which they source from Canada as the best place to get it.
Maybe because they didn't have a lot of chocolate flavors but I actually didn't buy any fudge for myself afterwards. The samples were more than enough for me. They did give us a small square of caramel fudge (again, not chocolate but more like penuche) after the tour to take home but I'll save that for tomorrow as I might've hit my sugar quotient for the day already. I did buy a box of fudge and chocolates from the Fudge Cottage for tonight - part of our tour includes a dinner hosted by a local New Zealand family. We're split into groups of 4 and have dinner at a local Kiwi home. I bought the chocolates as my hostess gift for tonight.
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