Treacle and Cinnamon Festive Fudge

Here’s a very festive looking and delicious fudge recipe. Heavily spiced with cinnamon and treacle, it’s a delicious mouthful of flavour :D They remind me of the filling of a cinnamon swirl, but with more texture. If it’s not Christmas time, don’t shape the squares. They’d be great as gifts :)

Makes around 60 small fudge balls

Ingredients:

For the fudge:

• 225g granulated sugar
• 225g dark brown sugar
• 110g butter
• 120ml double cream
• 2 tablespoons treacle
• ¼ tsp cream of tartar
• 1 heaped tablespoon ground cinnamon

For the decoration:

• 100g icing sugar
• 50g green fondant icing
• 50g red fondant icing

Method:

1. Grease and line a 20 x 20cm tray with non-stick baking parchment.

2. Add all of the ingredients apart from the ground cinnamon to a medium saucepan.

3. Stir continuously whilst heating until all of the sugar has dissolved – make sure that the sugar does not burn to the corners of the pan.

4. Place a sugar thermometer in the pan, and keep heating (and stirring) until the temperature is 115c/240f.

5. Remove from the heat. Pour into a stand mixer with the flat paddle attached if you have one (I’d recommend one for this next step!). Add the ground cinnamon and stir in.

6. Leave to cool for about 5 minutes, then use the stand mixer to stir the fudge (at a medium speed) until the mixture is cool – this takes approximately 15 to 20 minutes. If you don’t have a stand mixer you can do this by hand (it’s a great workout).

7. The fudge will become very thick and lose it’s glossiness. Once it has reached this stage, pour the fudge into the prepared tin, level off and leave for about 1 hour to set.

8. Cut the fudge into 60 squares. Roll each square into a sphere.

9. Make up the icing by adding a teaspoon of water to the icing and stirring. Keep adding water drop-wise, until the icing runs off a spoon but leaves a trail in the icing left behind. Pour into a piping bag.

10. Pipe splodges of white icing onto each ball – this doesn’t need to be neat. You can use a toothpick/knife to gently smooth it down the balls (to resemble the top of a Christmas pudding).

11. Roll out the green and red fondant to about 2mm thick. Use a small leaf cutter to cut out 2 leaves per fudge (alternatively for a less neat but quicker result, you can roll out tiny ovals of fondant to represent the leaves).

12. Make small spheres (only about 2-3mm wide) of the red fondant and place 2-3 on each fudge piece.

13. Stick the leaves around the berries.  Leave the icing to set (this takes about 30 minutes).

14. Enjoy!