Making Fudge at Murdick’s Fudge, Mackinac Island, Michigan

🔊🗣️🎶 Like “Bridge and Tunnel” in New York City and “Leaf Peepers” in rural New England in the fall, the term of endearment for pleasure-seeking outsiders on #Mackinac Island is “#Fudgies.” This is derived from the fact that housemade #fudge is a big draw to the island, a sweet treat embraced by visitors. At @OriginalMurdicks Fudge, purveyor of the sweet treat since 1887, our group of travel/food journalists and content creators went from Fudgies to Fudgemakers when @Haleem.1g led us in a special class to make #peanutbutter fudge from scratch, just after we’d watch him make a butter pecan batch. We assisted in the mixing, boiling, and stirring of ingredients—lots of white #sugar, corn syrup, inverted sugar, medium #brownsugar, #vanilla extract, and in our case, two big ladles of peanut butter. Then we let it all solidify on a marble tabletop, kneading and molding it with a putty knife during the duration of its cooling time. Murdick’s Fudge is just one of several fudgemakers on #MackinacIsland, fulfilling the demand of all the visiting Fudgies. Haleem said on average he and his team make 25 tabletop batches per day, each yielding about 55 slices. With operations 7 days a week for the season, that’s a whopping 9,625 slices of fudge they produce per week—over 38,500 per month! We saw our peanut butter fudge from start to finish, and were rewarded with slices to take home—and the honor to be a Fudgemaker instead of a damn Fudgie. — Time to make the fudge on #MackinacIsland, #Michigan, USA. #theglobaltripmackinac #theglobaltripmichigan