Easy Hot Fudge

HOT FUDGE WARNING: If you have a love affair with hot fudge…this post will only make it worse. If you don’t have a love affair with hot fudge…you soon will.

Alright, now that you’ve been fair warned about how good AND easy this hot fudge will be-let’s get to business and start talking about one of my all time favorites…HOT FUDGE.  I’m not going to lie.  One day it did occur to me that if everything hit the fan, I’d still really like to be able to eat hot fudge.  [ENTER FOOD STORAGE NEEDS HERE] So I set out to see how I could have hot fudge with out a) taking a trip to the store and b) using only items from my pantry (Hey, you’ve been asking me for more pantry recipes and I’m delivering! 😉  In fact, I finally used powdered butter.  Now, my general opinion about powdered butter is that you don’t need it.  It’s pricey and not generally cheaper or easier to use than fresh butter-plus, you know me I really love to use beans for butter/oil in my baking.  It’s cheaper, low-fat, and packed with fiber and vitamins.  Plus, powdered butter wasn’t meant to be re-constituted and put on toast or anything.  However, I may just keep a can or two on hand for something like this.  Now, don’t laugh…I really did try and put beans in this recipe and at this point (can you tell I’m not giving up yet?) I haven’t figured out the best way to do it for optimal results-but when I do, you can count on another post!  Can you imagine it, bean hot fudge-it will be awesome.  In the mean time for those of you who have powdered butter in your food storage, I will give you a few tips.

HOW TO USE POWDERED BUTTER TIPS

1. If you’ve tried using it, you may notice the directions are a little lack luster.  They go something like this “Mix enough powdered butter with water to reach the consistency desired.” Yeah….that doesn’t really help because obviously, just like powdered milk, we’d like to just throw in the butter powder with the dry ingredients and add the water to the wet.  Thankfully, on at least my Shelf Reliance can it had a recipe for cookies and I was able to deduce a basic ratio to use for the powdered butter.  Here is what you’ll do, use the full amount of powdered butter (meaning if your recipe calls for 1 cup butter, you’d use 1 cup powdered butter) with 1/4 amount of water (so again, if your recipe called for 1 cup butter, you’d use 1 cup powdered butter and 1/4 cup water).  Remember, this is  a BASIC conversion and you may realize it needs a little changing around as you use it.
2. Make sure you mix it with other dry ingredients-especially if that dry ingredient is powdered milk (like you’ll see in this recipe).  It will help the water get in there better with out clumping
3. And, it’s worth mentioning again that powdered butter was never meant to be used on something like toast.  You could probably use it to sprinkle on some popcorn or something but it was DESIGNED for baking.  If you’re looking for something to put on toast 1) remember that canning or bottling your own butter is HIGHLY UNSAFE-like it could kill you and should never be done (read more about it HERE) and 2) you should purchase something like Red Feather canned butter (commercially canned butter is safe, just expensive)

Alright, enough with the chit chat, let’s get to the good stuff: the hot fudge.  I was so impressed with this, because it did thicken and tasted so good!  Much better than what you can buy in the store-plus a whole lot cheaper.  I know I say this a lot, but I’m always so surprised every time I make something from scratch and realize it’s about a million times better than commercial products at the grocery store.  We had some friends over for dessert when I made this and it was a huge hit!

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[tasty-recipe id=”18369″]

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CRYSTAL’S TIPS:

Now if you’re like me, your mind got going on whether or not you NEEDED the chocolate chips or if you could just “make your own” from a chocolate chip substitution.  Well, I’m happy to report that you CAN!  I found these very helpful directions on how to use cocoa to substitute for chocolate chips (obviously, not in recipes that call for it in chip form but for those that call for melting them down)

ONE MORE THING: S’MORE COOKIES

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Oh yeah…and if a chocolate chip cookie recipe wasn’t good enough, I saw an idea where you put a marshmallow and hot fudge on top and it’s like a s’more cookie.  It’s pretty good and perfect for summer…on the days you feel like the calories will be worth it 😉

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MORE ON POWDERED BUTTER:

If you’d like to purchase some powdered butter for your food storage, you can get it at Emergency Essentials, Shelf Reliance, Augason Farms, and Honeyville Grains. As of today (7/12) Emergency Essentials is by far the cheapest ($5-7 cheaper than anywhere else)