Best Easy Hot Fudge Sauce Recipe!

HOT FUDGE WARNING: If you have a love affair with hot fudge…this post will only make it worse. If you don’t have a love affair with hot fudge…you soon will.

Alright, now that you’ve been fair warned about how good AND easy this hot fudge will be-let’s get to business and start talking about one of my all time favorites…HOT FUDGE. I’m not going to lie. One day it did occur to me that if everything hit the fan, I’d still really like to be able to eat hot fudge. [ENTER FOOD STORAGE NEEDS HERE] So I set out to see how I could have hot fudge with out a) taking a trip to the store and b) using only items from my pantry (Hey, you’ve been asking me for more pantry recipes and I’m delivering! ;) In fact, I finally used powdered butter. Now, my general opinion about powdered butter is that you don’t need it. It’s pricey and not generally cheaper or easier to use than fresh butter-plus, you know me I really love to use beans for butter/oil in my baking. It’s cheaper, low-fat, and packed with fiber and vitamins. Plus, powdered butter wasn’t meant to be re-constituted and put on toast or anything. However, I may just keep a can or two on hand for something like this. Now, don’t laugh…I really did try and put beans in this recipe and at this point (can you tell I’m not giving up yet?) I haven’t figured out the best way to do it for optimal results-but when I do, you can count on another post! Can you imagine it, bean hot fudge-it will be awesome. In the mean time for those of you who have powdered butter in your food storage, I will give you a few tips.

HOW TO USE POWDERED BUTTER TIPS

  1. If you’ve tried using it, you may notice the directions are a little lack luster. They go something like this “Mix enough powdered butter with water to reach the consistency desired.” Yeah….that doesn’t really help because obviously, just like powdered milk, we’d like to just throw in the butter powder with the dry ingredients and add the water to the wet. Thankfully, on at least my Shelf Reliance can it had a recipe for cookies and I was able to deduce a basic ratio to use for the powdered butter. Here is what you’ll do, use the full amount of powdered butter (meaning if your recipe calls for 1 cup butter, you’d use 1 cup powdered butter) with 1/4 amount of water (so again, if your recipe called for 1 cup butter, you’d use 1 cup powdered butter and 1/4 cup water). Remember, this is a BASIC conversion and you may realize it needs a little changing around as you use it.
  2. Make sure you mix it with other dry ingredients-especially if that dry ingredient is powdered milk (like you’ll see in this recipe). It will help the water get in there better with out clumping
  3. And, it’s worth mentioning again that powdered butter was never meant to be used on something like toast. You could probably use it to sprinkle on some popcorn or something but it was DESIGNED for baking. If you’re looking for something to put on toast 1) remember that canning or bottling your own butter is HIGHLY UNSAFE-like it could kill you and should never be done (read more about it HERE) and 2) you should purchase something like Red Feather canned butter (commercially canned butter is safe, just expensive)

Alright, enough with the chit chat, let’s get to the good stuff: the hot fudge. I was so impressed with this, because it did thicken and tasted so good! Much better than what you can buy in the store-plus a whole lot cheaper. I know I say this a lot, but I’m always so surprised every time I make something from scratch and realize it’s about a million times better than commercial products at the grocery store. We had some friends over for dessert when I made this and it was a huge hit!

Best Easy Hot Fudge Sauce

1/2 C. milk (3T. dry non-instant powdered milk or 1/3 C. instant powdered milk + 1/2 C. water)
1/4 C. butter (1/4 C. powdered butter + 1 T. water)
1/4 t. salt
2 C. (one 11 1/2 oz. package) of Nestle Semi-Sweet or Milk Chocolate Morsels
1 t. vanilla

Melt milk, butter, and salt on low. Heat until butter melts. Add chocolate chips; stir until morsels melt and mixture is smooth. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Makes 1 1/2 cups of hot fudge sauce.

Be sure to melt everything over low! If you get impatient, your chocolate will burn-blech. Also, you may notice that I doubled the amount of powdered milk the recipe calls for, that is because I wanted it to be more like an evaporated milk or a thicker milk.

CRYSTAL’S TIPS:

Now if you’re like me, your mind got going on whether or not you NEEDED the chocolate chips or if you could just “make your own” from a chocolate chip substitution. Well, I’m happy to report that you CAN! I found these very helpful directions on how to use cocoa to substitute for chocolate chips (obviously, not in recipes that call for it in chip form but for those that call for melting them down)

ONE MORE THING: S’MORE COOKIES

Oh yeah…and if a chocolate chip cookie recipe wasn’t good enough, I saw an idea where you put a marshmallow and hot fudge on top and it’s like a s’more cookie. It’s pretty good and perfect for summer…or on those days when you’re tired of the inversion and want to pretend like it’s summer ;)

wheat grinder sale

© 2013, Crystal. All rights reserved.

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  • jesslyn weaver

    I think I’m most excited about this post for the powdered butter tips! I have been absolutely baffled by my powdered butter and powdered margarine. Everything I’ve tried with them has failed and I can’t get the ratio right. This gives me a place to start, since it appears I’ve been using too much water. Thank you SO MUCH!