About Us

Highlands Fudge is located in Bowral, NSW, Australia. The business was established in 2007 and has already earned an excellent reputation for its range and quality of delicious fudges.
Currently supplying many local outlets, Highlands Fudge is now available online.

About Fudge
Fudge was invented in the United States in the late 1800s and may have been called "Divinity" in its most early forms because it tasted "simply divine".  Most historians believe that the first batch of fudge resulted from a bungled batch of caramels.  White fudges didn't appear until the early 1900s.  Lebanon, Pennsylvania has a specialty flavour that is highly rich and known as "Opera Fudge".

A letter written by Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, (a Vassar College student in Poughkeepsie, NewYork) reveals that Emelyn wrote that her schoolmate's cousin made fudge in Baltimore in 1886, and sold it for 40 cents a pound.  Miss Hartridge asked for the fudge recipe, and in 1888, made 30 pounds of fudge for the Vassar Senior Auction.  When word spread to other women's colleges of the tasty delight, fudge became a new confection.

In The Candy Cook Book, {Alice Bradley, 1929} an entire chapter is devoted to fudges. The introduction reads:

"The name fudge is applied to a large group of candies made of sugar boiled with water, milk, or cream, from 230 degrees F. to 238 degrees F., and stirred or worked with a paddle until candy becomes firm. If stirred while still hot, the resulting candy is coarse and granular. To prevent this, the syrup should be cooled in the saucepan in which it is cooked, or poured out upon a marble slab, platter, or agate tray that has been slightly moistened with a piece of wet cheesecloth. It should not be disturbed until cool. It should then be stirred with a wooden spoon, or worked with a spatula forward and lifting up the mass, turning it over and bringing it back, until the whole begins to get stiff. At this stage, turn into a pan, or, better still, leave the candy between bars on wax paper on a board, regulating the size of the open space according to the amount of candy and the thickness desired."

Fudge is a crystalline candy, which means that, unlike lollipops, caramels, and taffy, crystal formation is the key to making great fudge.  Tiny micro-crystals of sugar in fudge give fudge its firm but smooth texture. The secret to successful fudge is getting these crystals to form at just the right time.  Fudge is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that sugar crystals are not desirable in candy.  Tiny micro-crystals in fudge are what give it its firm texture.  When the crystals are small enough, they don’t feel grainy on your tongue, but smooth.
While you ultimately want crystals to form, it's important that they don't form too early. The key to successful, non-grainy fudge is in the cooling, not the cooking. The recipe calls for heating the ingredients to the soft-boil stage, or 234° F, then allowing it to cool undisturbed to approximately 110° F.  If you disturb the cooling fudge during this cooling phase you increase the potential for larger crystals (seed crystals) of sugar to form too early and thus a grainy fudge results.

A seed crystal is a surface that sucrose (sugar) molecules can begin to attach themselves to—it could be a few sucrose molecules stuck together, a piece of dust, or even a little air bubble.  Once a seed crystal forms, it grows bigger and bigger as the fudge cools. A lot of big crystals in fudge makes it grainy and results in the fudge having a sandy taste.
By letting the fudge cool without stirring, you avoid creating seed crystals.  Stirring would help sucrose molecules "find" one another and start forming crystals.  Stirring also introduces air, dust, and small dried bits from the walls of the saucepan—all potential seeds for crystal formation.

Not until the fudge has cooled to about 110° F, do you want to start the crystallization process.  You start to stir, and keep stirring, until the candy becomes thick.  The more you stir, the more crystal seeds you get.  But instead of getting a few huge crystals (and grainy candy), you get lots and lots of tiny crystals, which make for thick, smooth candy.
There are two other candies that deliberately employ sugar crystals. One is fondant, a wetter version of fudge that you find inside soft-center chocolates. The other is rock candy, for which a sugar solution is left for days to form enormous crystals.

Pictured below is a fudge kettle in action.  The kettle generates the proper temperature to mix the fudge in preparation to adding additional ingredients and the cooling process.  For example, to make Chocolate Walnut fudge, the hot fudge is poured into a container so that both the hot fudge and the walnuts can be mixed, then poured together into a cooling tray.