50g butter
500mls milk
800g sugar
Vanilla esssence
Enough for a 7"x7" square tin
The original recipe was for 2oz butter, 2lbs sugar and 1 pint milk. If you use 30g for an ounce you need an 8" x8" square tin.
Put a ramekin of cold water in the fridge to use for testing.
Grease the tin with butter.
Heat the milk and sugar over a low heat in a large pan, stirring with a wooden spoon until all the sugar has dissolved and you can't hear crunching when you stab the base of the pan.
Add the butter and bring to the boil. Keep stirring and boiling until it becomes golden and thicker and syrupy. Sort of light honey colour.
Get the ramekin of cold water and drop about 1 tsp of the mixture from a spoon into the water. It sort of settles on the surface and drops down to the bottom. It should be possible to gather it into a firmish but soft ball with your fingers. If it just dissolves, you need to keep boiling and stirring a bit longer.
Once you get the soft ball remove from the heat. Let cool for a few minutes and add some vanilla essence.
If you want the fudge to be really creamy you have to let it cool to 50°C as the temperature affects the size of the sugar crystals.
Start beating the fudge with a wooden spoon until the mixture falls from the spoon in a ribbon leaving a ribbon that doesn't immediately melt back into the mixture.
Pour into the greased tin and mark into squares. You may have to work quite quickly to get the fudge level before it sets.
If it doesn't set, don't worry, just stick it back in the pan and boil it up again and test again for a soft ball.
If you've let it boil a little too long and the ball is a bit harder it seems to set like concrete, more like tablet in my recent experience.
You can add other flavours like coffee and walnut or raisins soaked in rum. The only problem with liquid flavourings is that they can stop it setting and you need to reboil.
That's it. It's more technique than the actual recipe, so don't worry about condensed milk etc etc. This is the simplest recipe I've come across and it works quite weil. You can scale it up, too, just starting off with an amount of butter and multiplying to get the amount of milk and sugar you need.
Have fun!