“In the centre of the room there was an actual mountain, a colossal jagged mountain as high as a five-storey building, and the whole thing was made of pale-brown, creamy, vanilla fudge,” the chapter reads. “All the way up the sides of the mountain, hundreds of men were working away with picks and drills, hacking great hunks of fudge out of the mountainside … As the huge hunks of fudge were pried loose, they went tumbling and bouncing d own the mountain and when they reached the bottom they were picked up by cranes with grab-buckets, and the cranes dumped the fudge into open wagons.”
– Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
This was chapter five in one of many early drafts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but was cut from the version first published in the US in 1964 and in the UK in 1967 for being ‘too wild, subversive and insufficiently moral for the tender minds of British children’.
In the chapter Charlie Bucket – accompanied by his mother, not his grandfather – and the other children are led into the Vanilla Fudge Room, where one family faces the sinister prospect of the Pounding and Cutting Room.
Here I have a recipe to create your own chunks from Wonka’s Fudge Mountain, just be careful you don’t end up in the Pounding and Cutting Room yourself!
What you’ll need
6 gr cocoa
400 gr white sugar
2 tablespoons glucose syrup (corn syrup)
160 ml milk
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
30 gr butter
½ teaspoon salt
How to bake
1. In a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat, mix together the sugar, milk, cocoa and glucose syrup.
2. While stirring constantly, bring the mixture to a boil and continue with stirring until it reaches 238°F-240°F / 115°C (use a sugar thermometer). On average, it took about 20-25 minutes.
3. Remove the pan from the heat.
4. Add in the butter, let it melt but don’t stir the mixture.
5. When the temperature is reduced to lukewarm, pour everything into a mixer.
6. Add the vanilla and salt. Beat the mixture until the fudge is no longer shiny and becomes lighter in colour.
7. Spread on a baking paper lined tray and let sit until it is hardened.
8. Then cut it into bite-size pieces and enjoy!
