Porridge Fudge - but in a good way!

Yep - you did indeed read the title correctly. I have filled a previously undiscovered gap in the breakfast/confectionery crossover genre.

Think of a bowl of hot porridge. Imagine sprinkling brown sugar on top, and letting it melt. Then imagine getting your spoon and scooping up the warm melty sugary puddle. That is the taste of this fudge, so I really do mean it when I say it tastes of porridge but in a good way!

The obvious question to be pondering at this point is why? That's a big question - there are a lot of whys out there in the world. Such as... why is there always a single sock in every wash, despite only putting them in the machine in pairs; why is Mini-M so fixated with her kitten jumper that it had to take a bath along with her tonight; why is the dip to dunker ration so wrong in those little chocolate dip pots; why does the photocopier at work always jam when you're photocopying something that's non work related. But since attempting to consider all they whys in the world, or indeed even a trivial portion of them is likely to induce brain meltdown (for me anyway - although I shouldn't tar everyone's philosophical capacities with the same brush!) I'm sticking with one why for now. Why was I concocting porridge fudge?!

A birds eye view of porridge fudge

And those of you that know me will know by now that it was in the name of de-dairification. I found some soya fudge in a health food shop. I'm pretty sure there's some irony there - just because it has soya in it doesn't cancel out all the sugar and make it healthy! But it tasted of soya (no surprises). So I wanted to see if I could make dairy free fudge that didn't taste of soya. And I succeeded - it tastes of porridge!

I based it on the recipe for white chocolate fudge that I blogged back in October. It is most definitely not dairy free, being full of white chocolate and double cream! So when I say based, I mean I used the same general principle and changed half the ingredients...

Dairy Free Oat Fudge (Makes a 9inch round tin)

• 100g dark brown sugar
• 400g granulated sugar
• 3tbsp liquid glucose
• 500ml Oatly oat cream

First grease your tin and line the base with parchment to make it easy to turn out.
Put all the ingredients in a large heavy bottomed saucepan over a low heat, and allow to melt together.
Stir regularly until the sugar melts and is no longer grainy at all.
Once the sugar has dissolved, bring the mixture to the boil, and let it boil fairly vigorously.
Boil until the 'soft ball' stage is reached, or if you're using a sugar thermometer, 118C.
Take the mixture off the heat and stir for about 5 minutes until it starts to thicken and leaves a trail on the surface that doesn't sink back in straight away.
Pour into the prepared tin and give it a good shake to level the contents.
Allow to cool. Once it has cooled for half an hour or so, you can mark it into squares, but leave it in the tin to cool completely, ideally overnight.
Turn out, and cut into chunks.

Good fudge... bad photo!

I loved this - it definitely tasted fudgy, it didn't have the weird soya taste of so many dairy free sweets, and it reminded me of eating porridge for breakfast as a kid, when I'd sprinkle sugar on top and then make islands with the milk. Nostalgia and a sugar hit in one bite is a winning combination.

Plenty of normal dairy eating family and friends tried it too, and they all seemed to think it tasted good too - in a porridge-y sort of way! It doesn't quite have the texture of normal fudge - it was slightly more brittle, which I think is probably because the fat content of the oat cream was lower than double cream. But if you've got a dairy free friend and you make them up a batch of this, I'm fairly certain you'll be hailed as a hero/heroine (delete as appropriate!). Unless of course they don't like porridge...