Retirement Bucket List: Strike Two

I finally got round to making some fudge; something I had listed as the number one thing to do on my Retirement Bucket List (see here for the full [such as it is] list.)

I had a little Google on the old iPad and came up with what seemed to be one of the easiest recipes with the fewest ingredients - four to be precise, five if you count the oil for greasing the pan. The recipe is from the Good Food Channel website, here. Although once you've read this blog post you may not want to follow that particular link...

Ingredients and 'oiled' pan at the ready.

Basically, you weigh everything out, put it all in the saucepan and keep stirring.

And keep stirring.

And keep stirring.

Keep stirring to make sure all those burnt bits from the bottom of the saucepan are nicely distributed through the entire mixture.

And after 15-20 mins you can stop stirring.

By that time your mixture should have reached the 'soft ball' stage on the thermometer (115 degrees.)

Mine appeared to have reached 'centre of the sun, hard as a rock' stage by then.

And then I read the recipe again and noticed that only now should I be adding the vanilla extract, rather than at the beginning with all the other ingredients. Oops. Not sure how much of a difference that made to the outcome.

But I definitely did not make fudge.

I'm not sure if I can now strike this off the Bucket List. I didn't say that I had to 'successfully' make fudge, did I? But will the OCD part of my brain allow this failure to count? Oh dear.

I posted something on FaceBook about making fudge and a friend responded that fudge with chocolate in the ingredients can be easier to make. I may give that a go next time, although currently I am a little bit scarred by this first attempt. My arms are aching from all that stirring and my teeth are aching from the sugar (because, of course, I've still been eating the hot mess that is my hard-as-a-rock-toffee-crumble-stuff.)

Anyone else ever made fudge? Do you have a foolproof recipe you could share?