White Chocolate Peppermint Fudge

May arrived and the lawn, which has been a brown patchwork of recovering grass for two weeks, is now visibly green, the new growth thick enough that I will need to do the first mowing this weekend. The mower has been in the shed since October and required a small spring tune-up Tuesday — the spark plug replaced, the air filter cleaned, the blade sharpened on the bench grinder, the oil changed. The mower is a 1998 John Deere riding tractor that I bought used in 2004 and that has done twenty-one years of work for me, and the maintenance schedule I keep on it is the reason it is still working. There are men who buy a new mower every five years and there are men who buy a mower every twenty, and the difference between the two has nothing to do with the mowers and everything to do with the men.

The blog post this week was about the teenagers and the maple candy. I had been thinking about it since the grandchildren were home for Christmas and I noticed that Teddy and Anna and Ben — the three older ones — had not raided the candy tin the way they used to, the way they did for ten or twelve years of their childhoods. The younger ones (James and Lucy) still go for the candy when it is offered. The older three have moved into the phase of life where store-bought chocolate and other adult candies have begun to compete for their attention, the maple candy being a thing that requires the absence of better options to be appreciated, or so the teenagers seem to have decided. I wrote about this without complaint. The post was about the slow inevitable shift of grandchildren into adults and about the small private grief of the grandfather who keeps making the candy anyway and who would not have it otherwise. The candy goes into a tin. The tin goes onto the shelf. The grandchildren who want it know where it is. The ones who do not are not punished. The candy outlasts the phase. The phase outlasts the grandfather. None of this is bad. It is simply the order of things.

The post got more comments than I expected. People wrote in to say they had been the teenager who turned away from the candy and had come back to it as an adult, and people wrote in to say they were the grandfather watching the same shift in their own grandchildren, and people wrote in to say they had not thought about the candy in their grandfather's tin in forty years and now wanted to call him and could not because he had been dead for thirty. I read each comment. I responded to most. The blog continues to do the work I did not expect it to do when I started, which is to give people permission to feel the small ordinary feelings that adult life mostly does not have a place for, and to receive in return the small ordinary feelings of strangers, and to discover in the exchange that the feelings are not particular to me or to any one person but are the shared inheritance of everyone who has ever been a grandchild or a grandfather or both in succession.

Made a beef and mushroom stew Saturday — beef chuck, mushrooms from the co-op, red wine, three hours in the oven at three hundred. The dish is the kind of cool-weather stew that I will stop making in another month or two when the warmer cooking takes over, and I made a large potful so I would have it through the week. I ate it Saturday with mashed potatoes, Sunday with noodles, Monday with bread. The repetition of a single stew across multiple suppers is one of the disciplines of single-household cooking that I have come to appreciate, the way a good stew develops its flavor over the days, the way the cook who made it does not have to think about supper for half the week, the way the days take on a small pleasant continuity from the persistence of a single dish across them.

The maple candy post brought in more mail than I expected, and somewhere in reading through those comments I found myself thinking about the tin itself — the fact of it sitting on the shelf, waiting, indifferent to whether anyone opens it. I do not make maple candy in the summer, but I do keep a rotation of things in that tin, and this White Chocolate Peppermint Fudge is one of them: a confection that cuts clean, keeps well, and asks nothing of the person who made it except that they be willing to make it again next year regardless of who shows up to eat it. That willingness is, I think, the whole point.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 10 minutes | Total Time: 25 minutes plus 2 hours chilling | Servings: 36 pieces

Ingredients

3 cups white chocolate chips
1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon pure peppermint extract
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup crushed peppermint candies or candy canes, divided

Instructions

Prepare the pan. Line an 8x8-inch baking pan with parchment paper, leaving an overhang on two sides for easy removal. Lightly butter the parchment.
Melt the base. In a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat, combine the white chocolate chips, sweetened condensed milk, and butter. Stir constantly until the chocolate is fully melted and the mixture is smooth, about 8–10 minutes. Do not rush this over higher heat or the chocolate will scorch.
Add flavorings. Remove from heat. Stir in the peppermint extract, vanilla extract, and salt. Fold in 1/4 cup of the crushed peppermint candies.
Pour and top. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and spread evenly with a spatula. Immediately scatter the remaining 1/4 cup crushed peppermint over the top and press gently so it adheres.
Chill. Refrigerate uncovered for at least 2 hours, or until firm throughout.
Cut and store. Lift the fudge from the pan using the parchment overhang. Cut into 36 small squares with a sharp knife, wiping the blade clean between cuts for tidy edges. Layer in a tin between sheets of wax paper. Keeps at room temperature up to one week, or refrigerated up to three weeks.

Nutrition (per serving)

White Chocolate Peppermint Fudge — The Candy in the Tin