Easy Chocolate Fudge

This is so easy to make with no thermometers involved!  You can jazz up the recipe by adding some chopped nuts or dried fruit.

Ingredients
200g bar milk chocolate (I used Cadbury's dairy milk)
200g sweetened condensed milk (I used 1/2 a 400g can)
100g icing sugar (sifted)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Extra chocolate to sprinkle or decoration of your choice

Equipment
One 15 x 15cm tin approximately 3 cm deep
Baking parchment to line tin
Heatproof bowl
Small saucepan

Method

• Line the tin with the parchment.
• Break the chocolate into small pieces and place in heatproof bowl with the condensed milk.
• Place bowl over saucepan of simmering water making sure that the base of the bowl is not in contact with the water. 
• Heat gently stirring the chocolate until it has completely melted and combined with the condensed milk.
• Remove from the heat stirring in any additional ingredients (optional), add the icing sugar and vanilla essence and stir together.
• Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and level the surface with the back of a wet spoon.
• Sprinkle chocolate over the top (if using). 
• Chill for at least 2 hours.
• Lift out of the tin and cut into cubes.  Return to fridge and ideally leave overnight to firm up.  (If you can wait that long!)

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Taffy

When life gets you down, indulge in a large bowl of New England salt water taffy.  It doesn't make your problems disappear but it does make you feel a whole lot better if only momentarily.

I had planned to write quite a cynical and negative post today.  Usually I write straight onto the blog but today I wrote into a word document with the idea of copying and pasting it over.  Well, the computer crashed and I lost everything.  Negative thoughts acknowledged and lost to the ether.  A good job really as I don't really want to alienate the few visitors I have left!

Suffice to say that the post was going to be about volunteering and how I seem to have done a turnaround in my attitude to the whole volunteering industry.  I will just leave it at that.  For now.