Orange Creamsicle Halloween Fudge

So Autumn ushers in the beginning of the holiday season. A time of year I love immensely. Halloween, Harvest, Thanksgiving and Christmas have so many wonderful memories from my childhood, as well as for Holly. As we've been establishing our lives together, it's been nice to incorporate fun traditions that we had growing up from the Cravens, VanOrmans, Sansoms & Finlaysons.

I've been doing an annual Autumn Open House each year, where I make a selection of soups, chowders, stews & chili to share with all our friends. I enjoy opening our house up and just enjoying everyone's company and cooking for everyone. At this annual event, we also make a bunch of homemade Halloween treats to pass out. It's a chance for us to make something together. I'll create something food wise, and Holly will create some beautiful custom packaging for the goodies. I love that, we both love creating together. This year, I think I want to do a few types of fudge to share, along with our traditional orange and root-beer suckers we make.



I order a bunch of white, milk and dark chocolate each fall for my season of homemade candy making. I make items at Halloween, but the bulk comes from our annual tradition of making homemade chocolates at Christmas time to share. I measured out the amount of quality white chocolate that I needed and started making a batch.



Melting the butter, sugar & small amount of water together to start the fondant base.



No fudge is complete without marshmallow fluff. Sure you could make marshmallows from scratch. Been there. Done that. It's labor intensive. You could also melt whole marshmallows but that makes for a tougher texture. Marshmallow fluff is the way to go. And I love how it's back in it's retro packaging from the 50s.



Cooking the candy away, and bringing it to a full boil in preparation for cooking it to soft ball stage.



Once the right consistency is achieved, you add the chopped white chocolate and marshmallow fluff. Mix it all together, until you get a uniform dull gloss. That makes the perfect consistency.



Once the fudge was ready, I removed 1/3 of the batch and flavored it with best quality vanilla. The other 2/3 of the batch was flavored orange, and dyed a light hue. It's sets up quick, so I immediately added the orange to a prepped pan. Put the spoonfuls of the vanilla on top, then used a kitchen knife and swirled it all together to give it the marbled look.



After I let this set up for a day or two, I had a sample. Holly had a sample. We both then decided it was best to get it out of the house, so I put a platter together and brought it to work to share with all my colleagues. It was pretty much gone right after I put it out. They do like it when I cook and bring in food for them...LOL!