I’ve been looking for the holy grail of hot fudge sauce and I tried a new one yesterday. This one is really for grownups as it’s not really sweet and it’s very chocolaty. We find that ice cream is really sweet and then topped with even sweeter hot fudge makes it tough to eat 3 bowls.
We’ve been burning the candle at both ends as usual. We’re nearly ready to launch fooderific.com and a new website I haven’t told you about yet that I’m sharing with Helene Dsouza from MasalaHerb.com and then there’s our business and our EasyRecipe plugin support plus the house chores and shopping and dog walking. I’m sure your lives are just the same so you’ll understand why we threw up our hands yesterday afternoon and headed to the park with the dog.
We brought sandwiches and a blanket and ate and read books in the dappled sunlight. I took these two photos with my tablet that I used as my book reader and it came in handy as a camera, albeit not the best camera.
Then as we’re lying on the blanket, an elderly couple comes to the picnic table next to us and talked about how much they want a new dog since theirs has died and they played with Charlie and he got all excited. They even gave him some chicken and they are now his newest best friends. They got emotional and teary talking about their dog that had died and really appreciated playing with Charlie. All I could think of was, “thank God I gave him a bath this morning.”
He needs a clip and it was warm so I took off his leash and threw a stick in the river and off he went. When I’d had enough I brought him out of the water and went to the car to get his beach towel. After drying him off he shook all over John’s library book (and face). Good thing I live with a man who doesn’t get flustered by ANYTHING — he just laughed. Just as I was going back to the blanket, Charlie Shaw decided to sit and he put his tail in his water bowl. He didn’t move so I took his picture too.
It felt SO good to be doing something other than “I shoulds.” We were only gone a couple of hours and the park is less than 5 minutes from our house so it wasn’t a huge adventure but nice to get away.
So here goes. You all know we met through an ad on the internet back in 1994. John’s been a programmer all his life and is Aussie right down to his underpants.
He went to a posh school in Melbourne and his parents were both teachers so he doesn’t talk like Crocodile Dundee but I did fall for the Australian accent. He says the same thing about me and to this day even after 18 years, he translates and calls it the trunk of the car instead of the boot and the hood instead of the bonnet and we always buy gas and not petrol.
He’s the most easy-going man I’ve ever known and I can count the number of arguments on the fingers of one hand. Neither of us likes to argue and we’ve never said the words you can’t take back. We’re a very lucky couple. Not perfect.. he IS a man after all. He treats me as a complete equal.
What he likes best though, is ice cream — with or without extra cream on top. I told him I was making some vanilla ice cream and a new hot fudge recipe and I could tell he would be ready for it when I finished. I went to the pantry to get the sugar and there were ants in it! I dumped it out and then had to use raw sugar for the ice cream. John said the ants couldn’t possibly have eaten very much but I dumped them out, all the same.
Raw sugar gave it a bit of a caramel color and taste but only a hint of it. I really liked it. John’s not a caramel person and said, “I’d like chocolate better.”
Hot fudge is the classic sundae topping and a dollop of this on top of your ice cream will make your mouth do a happy dance. I like watching it drip down the ice cream.
The sauce only takes a few minutes to make and most of us have these ingredients on hand so why not give it a go? I used really dark cocoa powder and dark chocolate and the sauce is nearly black. Color aside, it tastes really good.
- ⅔ cup cream
- ¼ cup good cocoa
- ⅓ cup brown sugar (you could go ½ cup if you like it sweeter)
- ½ cup light corn syrup
- ¼ tsp salt (scant)
- 170 grams (6 oz) dark chocolate chopped and divided
- 2 tbs unsalted butter (or use salted and use less salt)
- 1 tsp good vanilla extract
- Place the cream, syrup, sugar, cocoa, salt and half of the chopped chocolate in a saucepan on low heat until chocolate has melted and then raise the temperature until the mixture comes to a simmer. Cook for 5-6 minutes, stirring occasionally.
- Remove from heat and add the other half of the chocolate, the butter and the vanilla extract and stir til smooth.
- Let cool for 15-20 minutes and place in jars and when cool place in the refrigerator. The sauce will be very thick but half a minute in the microwave (or less) will make it pourable but still thick.
- It will keep in the fridge up to 2 weeks if it lasts that long.