One thing you learn when you make fudge, is that it all just somehow happens'or not. It's so easy for it to go slightly, or completely, wrong - it happened to us once. Yes, we burnt the sugar (but only once). It wasn't all bad because it made us realise we needed a little reminder - to make sure we never did it again. So that's what we called ourselves - Burnt Sugar - (because we also realised we needed a name).
Yes, sometimes fudge happens just right. The perfect mix of sticky ingredients, beaten 'til it's the perfect crumbliness and finally broken into the perfect little random pieces. My mother used to get it right all the time. She sold it in paper bag packs in a shop down in Lyme Regis - and the same people used to come back year after year for more. It was almost as famous as the fossils (and a lot less crunchy).
We thought it wasn't fair to save it all for holidaymakers - they're happy enough as it is. So with her permission we took it to some people who could really use cheering up-we took it London, to the Borough Market.
It obviously did the trick because suddenly everyone wanted a piece of it. I had to build a bigger kitchen, my husband got involved and we hired some fudge-loving chefs. And one esteemed sweetie connoisseur even said it was the best fudge in the world.
We think it's because we carried on making mum's fudge exactly as she did. Using the same pure ingredients - like the most caramelly unrefined sugar, delicious cream, the richest treacle and the goldenest syrup. And we still cook it in the same old-fashioned copper pans, and beat it and stir it the same way she did (she loved a good old figure-of-eight-wooden-spoon movement). Most crucially of all, we still get the perfect crumbliness that just melts and dissolves on your tongue.
It's true - as fudge sometimes turns out just right, so has Burnt Sugar. So we try to do things just right too. We've got a few new types of sweets but we always stick to the same basic principles of sweetness: you can read about them in our ethics.
Today you can still find us down at the Borough Market - that's where we get to chat with sweet lovers about new recipes, the right temperate for caramel squidginess and which cows make the best clotted cream. But you can also buy our sweets from Oxfam, Waitrose, Ocado, Tesco, Whole Foods Market.
As long as you keep enjoying our sweets, we promise to keep making them exactly right. The stickier, the crumblier and the squidgier the better.
Yours sweetly,
Justine Cather
(the one who took mum's recipe and burnt the sugar)
