Double Recipe Disaster: Failed Peanut Butter Fudge and Pate de Fruit

While I successfully did make two tempered chocolate candies for the August Daring Bakers' Challenge, they were only half the story. I also had two flops. But I refused to surrender to defeat and took my two failures and turned them into a delicious success!

Peanut Butter and Jelly Ice Cream with Fudge Crumb Topping

That's what you make when your peanut butter fudge fails. I think the recipe I used forgot to mention to remove the pot from the heat source after reaching the proper temperature so I overcooked it.

The fudge literally turned into a fairly soft brick that I had to chip and chisel to release from the pan.

The thing is, while it looked awful it tasted great and I hated to throw it out.

So I used a strainer and separated the crumbs from the chunks.

Like many of the other Daring Bakers my Pate de Fruit was undercooked and didn't set. Pate de Fruit (pronounced pat-de-fwee) is a gumdrop like confection but it's made using pure fruit puree so the flavor of the fruit is natural and it's softer and less chewy than a gumdrop.

I wasn't really surprised. Everything was working against me. First I couldn't find liquid pectin that the recipe shared on the Daring Bakers website called for so I found a different recipe online that used powdered pectin.

But then my kitchen scale broke. Problematic because the only powdered recipe I could find was in grams and my back up scale was in ounces only. This is a problem because you can't convert all gram measurements to ounces because volume measurement and weight measurement can vary by density, blah, blah, blah.

So in short: The odds were against me.

So I emptied out my paper cups of jelly like Pate de Fruit into a bowl and chilled it in the fridge.

Then I made a fresh batch of Ben and Jerry's French vanilla ice cream. It takes about 20 minutes.

When the ice cream was done I dumped it in a casserole and threw in the chunks of peanut butter fudge.

I mixed them in and put in the freezer for a few minutes. I did this because my ice cream was pretty soft and I didn't want the fudge to all settle on the bottom.

After the ice cream had set for about 15 minutes I took it out and dumped the strawberry jelly on top.

I swirled it into the ice cream with a spoon and put back in fridge to set a bit more. Later I scooped it out into a plastic tub when the fudge was suspended in the ice cream.

The end result was pretty good. While the fudge is just a bit grainy the peanut flavor is great and the sweet strawberry jelly reminded me of those little plastic parfait cups you had as a kid that come with the little wooden spoon.

So all in all I turned my two flops into a pretty darn good success. Just goes to show there's always hope and you should never give up on things that look bad but taste good :D

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If you liked this post you'll enjoy these Bakers' Challenges too:

• January 2011: Fancy Joconde Imprime Entremet
• February 2011: Panna Cotta and Florentine Cookies
• March 2011: Meringue Coffee Cakes
• April 2011: Maple Mousse in an Edible Container
• May 2011: Chocolate, Tequila and a Blow Torch!