Oh I do like Miss Hope. If you’ve never heard of her, and nor had I until I was sent her book by the publishers. She is the author of our first give-away – Miss Hope’s Chocolate Box, a book all about making sweets, chocolates, truffles ‘and other splendid recipes’.
I can confirm that her Maple and Pecan Fudge is indeed splendid. At least the second time I made it it was. The first time, it didn’t set properly, and oozed a sticky nutty sugar mixture across the kitchen work top which didn’t stop us scooping up such deliciousness and eating it off the knife.
It wasn’t Miss Hope’s fault – I didn’t read my jam thermometer properly so failed to let it boil for long enough. The second time it worked perfectly.
So who is Miss Hope? (The publishers report she doesn’t answer to anything other than Miss Hope). Judging by her book, she is the funny and bossy half of the Hope and Greenwood sweetshops in Covent Garden and Dulwich.
Shops full of humbugs and sugar plums and Fizz Bang Wallops. Sounds great doesn’t it? She writes in a wonderfully anarchic style about chocolate covered chillies, coffee walnut whips and limoncello creams. Now at long last I have a use for that bottle of limoncello I bought off some nuns in Italy three summers ago.
But boy is she bossy, Listen to this:
“Now pay attention as this bit’s important. There are rules when it comes to making good chocolate, and rules must be obeyed at all times. Failure to obey the rules will result in hot chocolate on your kaftan, bircarbonate of soda on your burns and a bit of girly weeping into your waffle tea towel. So look lively, read the dos and don’t and stop blubbering’
Of her husband, Mr Greenwood she writes: he is ‘stocky as a bulldog, brave as a badger, whiskered as a weasel’ and is ‘colourful of both shirt and language, broad of both chest and mind. Lover of pies, quaffer of Rioja and avid reader of the Bravissimo catalogue’. You get the picture.
I like Miss Hope and her fudge is delicious. For the recipe click here.