Hot Fudge Frame-Up: A Fudge Shop Mystery (28 page)

P
REPARATION
: 10
MINUTES
C
OOKING
TIME
: 20
MINUTES

This is an easy recipe you can make on your stove top or in the microwave.

Before you cook: Prepare an 8-by-8-inch pan by either greasing it with butter on the bottom and sides or lining it with wax paper so that the wax paper comes over the edges. Spray the paper lightly with nonstick vegetable cooking spray.

14-ounce package semisweet chocolate chips

1 cup milk chocolate chips

14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk

2 tablespoons butter

4 teaspoons raspberry flavoring

³
/
₄
cup raspberry jam

Whipped cream (for garnish)

Fresh raspberries (for garnish)

Melt the chocolate chips in the microwave with the sweetened condensed milk and butter on medium heat for 3 or 4 minutes. Stir, and return it to the microwave as needed until it’s melted and smooth. (Stove-top method: Put chips, milk, and butter in a medium-sized saucepan on medium heat. Stir constantly until it’s melted and glassy.)

Add the raspberry flavoring. Stir thoroughly.

Pour half the mixture into the prepared pan. Using a spatula, spread a light layer of raspberry jam across the fudge, being careful to keep the jam away from the edges. Pour the remaining fudge on top, completely covering the jam. Let it cool and sit for a day.

To serve Ava’s way, as a dessert:
Cut fudge into 1-inch squares or any size you wish. (If you used wax paper in your pan, grab the edges of the paper to lift the entire pan of fudge out onto a cutting board. Remove the wax paper before cutting the fudge.) Serve on dessert plates with a dollop of whipped cream on the side and with several fresh raspberries atop the whipped cream and on the dish. Enjoy bites of fudge, cream, and raspberries in any order.

Rose petals are lovely, edible additions to confections and desserts. Use organic (chemical free), fresh rose petals in your favorite colors for this recipe. You can find edible flowers in specialty shops or produce sections of grocery stores, and if not, you might do what I did—ask your neighbor for a couple of blooms.

Before you cook: Prepare an 8-by-8-inch pan by either greasing it with butter on the bottom and sides or lining it with wax paper so that the wax paper comes over the edges. Spray the paper lightly with nonstick vegetable cooking spray.

2 cups semisweet chocolate chips*

1 cup milk chocolate chips

1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons rose water*

1 medium rose blossom in full bloom (about 2 inches across)

Optional: crystallized rose petals for garnish**

Prepare the rose petals that you want to go into the fudge. Pluck them from the blossom, then cut each into small edible pieces (half-inch diameter or smaller).

Put chips, milk, butter, and salt in a medium-sized saucepan on medium heat. Stir constantly until it’s melted and glassy. This will take about 20 minutes.

Add the vanilla extract and rose water. Stir thoroughly. Pour it into a prepared pan. Sprinkle the fudge with rose petals. Work them into the top of the fudge with a greased spatula.

*Using white chips:
This is lovely when made with white chocolate and I prefer that variety because the roses show up so well against the white fudge—however, the rose flavor can be overpowering. When using white chocolate, reduce the rose water to 1 tablespoon.

**To crystallize rose petals:
Use whole petals plucked fresh from the blossom. Mix powdered egg whites or powdered meringue according to directions on the package. Dip rose petals in the prepared mixture; let the excess drip off each petal. Set these on waxed paper and sprinkle both sides with extra-fine sugar, such as bartender’s sugar. Let them dry. Drying will take about two days, depending on the humidity in the air.

I met Ron Anderson when he was making booyah at the second annual Pilsen, Wisconsin, kermis in August 2013. Bob and I were on our way to nearby Door County and had stopped by the kermis on a whim after seeing a notice for the fall harvest celebration posted in the nearby Stangelville church, where we’d stopped to gawk at the famous and historic European-style, ornate building. The sign on the bulletin board said “Booyah, burgers, and ring bologna.” And anybody was welcome. How could we resist?

Two miles down the road we came upon a rural, barnlike ballroom filled with about two hundred people enjoying good food, Belgian pies, and polka music. Ron was out back stirring the booyah in a huge stainless steel pot over an open flame. The thick red stew smelled heavenly. When I asked about his recipe, he handed me one that was already laminated. So many people enjoyed his booyah that he’d begun giving it away as fast as nuns give away prayer cards to kids. With his permission, I’m offering Ron’s recipe here for your own community’s kermis. My adaptation of the savory stew follows, created to feed just 8 to 12 people.

Ron Anderson’s Booyah

Y
IELD
: 22
GALLONS
S
ERVINGS
: 100+

40 pounds chicken, cut in half

6 pounds beef roast

8 bunches celery

8 cans green beans

2 large heads cabbage

10 pounds carrots

20 pounds potatoes

10 pounds onions

3 jars V-8 juice

3 16-ounce cans peas

3 16-ounce cans corn

6 16-ounce cans mixed vegetables

1 gallon diced tomatoes

Spices

3 tablespoons pepper

1 cup salt

3 tablespoons Accent salt

8 ounces Lawry’s seasoning salt

1 jar chicken base

Take along

Bowls and spoons

Pails

Kettle, barrel, basket, hooks, paddle, and dipper

2 x 4

Knives, soup ladle, cutting boards

Roaster

Water to top of basket. Cook the chicken and beef 3
¹
/
₂
to 4 hours. Bone the chicken and beef, then refrigerate. Turn down heat to a simmer. Add V-8 juice, tomatoes, cabbage, onions, and spices. Heat this for
¹
/
₂
hour. Do not boil it hard. Gradually add celery, carrots, green beans, mixed vegetables, peas, corn, and potatoes. When the potatoes are done add chicken and beef. Heat this for about 15 minutes. Turn off the heat. This stays hot for about 4 hours.

Christine DeSmet’s Booyah

S
ERVINGS
: 8–12

Use a stock pot that holds at least 5 quarts.

2 cups shredded chicken (adjust amount in pot to taste)

1 pound beef roast (optional/booyah is often chicken meat only)

¹
/
₂
teaspoon salt

¹
/
₂
teaspoon Lawry’s seasoned salt

¹
/
₂
teaspoon pepper

2 medium onions, chopped

1 bay leaf

1 cup chopped carrots

1 cup chopped celery

1 cup canned green beans

1 cup canned mixed vegetables

1 cup canned corn

1 cup canned peas

2 chicken bouillon cubes

1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes

4 ounces V-8 juice (low sodium)

6 medium-sized red potatoes, chopped or quartered

Additional tomato juice (as desired for thinning the stew)

Simmer cut-up chicken in enough water to cover it; cook this until it’s tender and falling off the bones. Remove the chicken pieces from the pot to a bowl. Save the water in the pot. Strip the meat from bones and set aside. Put the beef in the chicken-flavored water and simmer it for 30 minutes.

Add the 2 cups of shredded chicken back into the pot with all of the other ingredients. Add more water and tomato juice as needed if it looks too thick. Add more chicken if you decided not to use beef in this recipe. Simmer it for 90 minutes to 2 hours—until the beef is tender and can be broken apart. Do not boil it.

Serve this with crusty bread, cheeses, Belgian mustards, and a Belgian beer (made with Door County cherries or wheat!).

Many thanks to my readers who enjoy Ava Oosterling and her grandpa Gil, as well as Belgian chocolate, fudge, and the occasional tasty beer infused with Door County ingredients. What more do we need to be happy, right?

Many thanks to my taste testers at University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies, who weighed in with votes and comments on Rose Garden Fudge. They included Judy Brickbauer, Christina Finet, Vanika Mock, Ellen Morin, Laurie Scheer, Kathryn Sweet, Anne Voxman.

Thank you to my neighbor Ken Belmore for the lovely red roses to use in my recipes.

Much appreciation goes to Ed Felhofer, docent at the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse in Door County, who gave me the “mystery author murder tour”; lighthouse manager Patti Podgers; and writer and student of mine Cheryl Hanson, who gave me detailed notes about the lighthouse.

Whenever I have a question about the Belgians in Door County, Wisconsin, I go straight to wonderful Belgians Al and Theresa Alexander, who work with organizations like the Peninsula Belgian American Club and the Namur (Wisconsin) Belgian Heritage Foundation. Don’t miss the September kermis in Namur!

My research took me to Kilwins confectionary store in Madison, Wisconsin, where manager Curtis Diller gave me tons of time and expertise—and great fudge.

Booyah recipe? Ron Anderson in Kewaunee County gave me a scrumptious one.

A big thanks to an important team: Danielle Perez, executive editor, New American Library/Penguin Group, for her continued support of this mystery series and for her creative suggestions; Neal Armstrong, for wonderful book covers; and John Talbot, of the Talbot Fortune Agency.

Thank you to my fellow Wisconsin Sisters in Crime author members who answer my many questions, especially Deb Baker (aka Hannah Reed), Kathleen Ernst, and Peggy Williams (aka MJ Williams).

Thank you for the great support from Joanne Berg, owner, Mystery to Me Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, and to the lovely stores in Door County and beyond who featured my book in their front windows and on special shelves.

Finally, thanks to my family for their support, especially the greatest guy a confectioner author could have—Bob Boetzer—who’s sweeter than fudge!

T
he royals were coming in two weeks to our tourist haven of Door County, Wisconsin—a thumb of land in Lake Michigan called the “Cape Cod of the Midwest.”

The momentous event had panicked me, Ava Oosterling. It’s why I was in an unused, stuffy church attic with my best friends, Pauline Mertens and Laura Rousseau. We were looking for a divinity fudge recipe while vowing not to find a dead body.

Divinity fudge is a white meringue-style confection and an American invention, though this type of fluffy nougat candy can be traced to ancient Turkish Europe and back thousands of years BC, when Egyptians combined marshmallow root with honey. Local lore said that a Catholic nun may have served school children divinity fudge. She allegedly left the handwritten recipe inside the church that Pauline, Laura, and I were cleaning.

Finding and making this divine recipe would help improve my reputation. Immensely. Since returning to Fishers’ Harbor last spring, I had unintentionally combined my Belgian fudge making with helping our local sheriff solve two murders. I was determined to stay out of trouble and focus on fudge.

Nature was cooperating. Three hours ago I had been in my fudge shop, and everybody had been talking about how we’d be at our colorful best for Prince Arnaud Van Damme from Belgium and his mother, Princess Amandine. Today was the second Saturday in September. Door County’s famous maple trees overhanging the ribbons of two-lane country roads bore leaves tipped in scarlet. The leaf-peeper tourists clogged our streets and roadside markets on the weekends to snap up pumpkins, apples, grapes, and everything made from our county’s famous cherries.

I’d increased fudge production at Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge & Beer. I’d also opened a small roadside market in the southern half of the county near my parents’ farm with the hope of catching more tourists coming to see the prince. My six copper kettles were constantly filled with fresh cream from my parents’ Holsteins, the world’s best chocolate from Belgium, and sugar. Favorite fudge flavors flying off my shelves included maple, butterscotch, double-Belgian chocolate with walnuts, and pumpkin. But I couldn’t wait to serve the prince and princess my Fairy Tale line of fudges—cherry-vanilla Cinderella Pink Fudge and Rapunzel Raspberry Rapture Fudge.

This brouhaha over a prince could be blamed on my grandpa. Finding a divinity fudge recipe from the 1800s for the prince was Grandpa Gil’s idea. So was asking the royals to travel here to tour our famous St. Mary of the Snows Church in Namur, Wisconsin. The tour would occur during our fall harvest festival, called a kermis. Last summer, Pauline’s boyfriend, John Schultz, had found an antique cup during a Lake Michigan diving expedition. The initials on the cup were “AVD,” which Grandpa thought might belong to Grandma Sophie’s ancestor Amandine Van Damme. Grandpa searched Grandma’s ancestry and found, lo and behold, that a few of her shirttail relatives were part of the current noble class in Namur, Belgium!

Our Namur—pronounced
Nah-meur
—is a wide spot in the road, a collection of a half dozen buildings amid farm fields about forty miles south of my fudge shop. It’s within a stone’s throw of my parents’ farm, near the neighboring village of Brussels. Some of our towns were named for places in Belgium because the southern half of Door County was settled by Belgian immigrants in the 1850s, including my ancestors.

We were all shocked that Grandpa had called up the royals on his cell phone as if they were mere contacts. He’d reached some assistant, of course, but it had turned out Prince Arnaud was eager to bring more tourists to
his
city of Namur. The prince had accepted Grandpa’s proposal to visit to our shock. But the prince saw this as a tourism mission, which could benefit both Namurs.

Jubilation here over this development was tempered by my reputation. The fishermen and tourists coming in to buy fudge kept saying that “Things happen in threes.” One smiley-faced man asked, “Do ya think that prince is gonna take a powder? Ava, you stay away from him, ya hear?”

“Taking a powder” meant he’d die in yet another murder involving me and my fudge.

“I’m not superstitious,” I insisted. “I’m scientifically minded.”

Fudge making is about the exactness of heat and the precise crystallization stages of sugar. Depending on what type of fudge you were making, that sugar had to bubble and get to the “soft-ball” stage temperature of two hundred thirty-eight degrees. Divinity fudge—what the prince had said he wanted to try—needed two hundred sixty degrees.

Truth be told, even my scientific side was on tenterhooks. Divinity fudge is notoriously hard to make; you can’t have a speck of humidity, or the egg white meringue will flop. And Door County is a peninsula surrounded by water and humid breezes. In addition, every time a climacteric event had been planned lately in my life, a body showed up, with my relatives wringing their hands over my involvement.

Ironically, this time my parents and grandparents wanted me involved.

Why? Because Prince Arnaud Van Damme was thirty-six (only four years older than me) and a bachelor who was going to inherit a castle.

My relatives aren’t hot about my current boyfriend, Dillon Rivers. They have their reasons. My mother still slips at times and calls Dillon “that bigamist.” A part of me can’t blame them for trying to distract me with a handsome prince.

Oddly enough, my grandma wasn’t enthused about her royal relatives traveling to Wisconsin. Ever since Grandpa contacted them a month ago, she’d been acting aloof about the visit, as if she didn’t want to own up to being related to them.

“Grandma, how come you never told me about them before?” I asked her last week while she was making one of her famous cherry pies. We were in her cabin on Duck Marsh Street in Fishers’ Harbor. I live across the street.

“I guess I forgot. They’re so far back in my family tree, they’re barely a twig.”

A twig? She forgot royalty?!
My scientific mind said something was amiss.

I asked her, “Are you mad at Grandpa for inviting them? Did he make up the story about the divinity fudge?” I had assumed he had all along. My search today in the church was merely to please him.

She’d heaved a big sigh as she pulled a fresh, steaming cherry pie from the oven. “He didn’t make up that story about the Virgin Mary.”

My overzealous, matchmaking grandfather, Gil Oosterling, told the royals the divinity fudge had allegedly been enjoyed by the Blessed Virgin Mother after she’d appeared in front of Sister Adele Brice in 1859 in the nearby woods.

The Blessed Mother?

Yes. That Mother.

Here? In Wisconsin?

Yes. It’s true. A bishop even sanctioned it as the only such sighting in the entire United States. In December 2010, the
New York Times
did a big article on it.

Grandpa says that Adele—from the Belgian province of Brabant, where Prince Arnaud is from, too—hid the original, handwritten divinity fudge recipe within the bricks of St. Mary of the Snows church to protect it from the fire dangers presented by wood structures and stoves in the 1800s. Grandpa had told the prince I would make Sister Adele’s divinity fudge recipe for dessert at the kermis, with the meal being served in the beautiful little church. Not only that, but Grandpa had said we’d present the original recipe document to the royals. Grandpa had learned the prince wanted to build a museum in Namur that would highlight the history and culture of our sister cities. Housing a priceless recipe in the museum would be like the famous Shroud being kept in the church in Turin, Italy. Thousands of people would visit Belgium each year. Grandpa said the recipe would come back to us on a two-year cycle or some such thing, and thus, thousands might visit Door County, too.

The prince had suggested the divinity fudge I made could be part of a fund-raiser for the church, which is now used as the Belgian Heritage Center. Princess Amandine was enthralled, too. She called divinity fudge “heavenly candy, white and pure as the robes worn by the nun and Blessed Virgin Mary.”

Princess Amandine had told Grandpa that divinity fudge was a rare treat. She’d eaten it only once, and that was when she had been a little girl. I’d attempted to make it once and given up because all I’d made was goo. Supposedly there was something special about Sister Adele’s recipe that made it foolproof. I was intrigued about this, but Grandpa was obsessed. There was mention that Grandpa and I might receive some special governmental medal of honor for this divinity fudge recipe.

This royal visit had gotten out of hand quickly.

But the church lacked a steeple. It had crumbled long ago. Selling tickets to see a prince and eat fudge would give a proper home to the three white crosses perched precariously on the peaked roof.

Pauline, Laura, and I had volunteered to be on the church-cleaning committee, a handy excuse to spy in every nook. We had just finished going through the beastly hot, stuffy attic bedroom above the kitchen. The bedroom was about eight by ten feet. One small window in the slanted roof let in light. The room had been used by a traveling priest back in the 1860s before a rectory was built. After finding no divinity fudge recipe, we’d hurried down the narrow stairs into the kitchen, panting.

Pauline glugged from her water bottle. She was red-faced and sweating, her long black braid frizzed from heat and humidity. “I’m done. This is stupid, you know.”

“We have to look in the basement still,” I insisted. My long auburn ponytail had gone limp, sagging onto the back of my hot neck.

Laura ran a hand up her sweaty forehead and through her blond bangs and bob. “We need a break before the basement. I like your grandfather, but this isn’t my idea of a fun way to spend a Saturday morning. Besides, I’ve got to go home and bake bread all afternoon.”

Laura ran the Luscious Ladle bakery. She supplied fresh-baked goods to our five-star restaurants. I sold her mouthwatering cinnamon rolls with gooey icing dripping off them at Ava’s Autumn Harvest on Highway 57.

I waved a hand in the air, giving in, but only a little. “Take a break. I need to check on Grandma anyway, out in the graveyard. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Then we head for the basement.”

Pauline said, “All we’ll find will be mummified mice and musty dust motes. At least I hope that’s all we find. Things happen in threes, you know.”

I hurried out without responding, though inside my head a voice reminded me that Pauline was always right.

* * *

Grandma Sophie was only a few yards east of the front doors, tidying what always appears to visitors to be an odd graveyard. In a boxy space under the lone giant maple tree, about thirty headstones sat in rows within
six inches
of one another. A joke around here says the people were buried standing up. What really happened was that in 1970, the priest had moved the headstones from the graveyard located where the lawn is now at the back of the church. Nobody had been buried there for at least a hundred years, by that time. The ground had been resettling, and the stones were sinking or toppling. To save the lichen-etched stones from disappearing altogether, they were moved. Because the collection sits in front of a blacktopped parking lot next to the church, people mistakenly believe the priest paved over the old church graveyard. But it’s a myth that cars park atop Belgians at rest.

On her knees, squeezed in between the headstones, Grandma was fussing over the placement of potted yellow and orange mums.

Grandma’s wavy white hair buffeted about her shoulders in the breeze.

“That looks really nice, Grandma. You look nice, too.” She wore a red long-sleeved T-shirt, black denim jeans, and sturdy walking shoes.

“Thank you, Ava, honey. Did you find the recipe?”

“No. Are you sure Grandpa didn’t make that up? Has he had the three of us looking for a nonexistent recipe?” Grandpa liked a good joke, so I was still suspicious.

Grandma Sophie grunted as she shoved at the ground to get up off her knees. I rushed to help. Last spring she’d broken a leg. She still experienced pain.

Once we stood together before the headstones, with my arm secured around her waist, she said, “My grandparents used to talk about that fudge recipe. My great-grandparents were there at the time of Sister Adele. They knew her personally. So I believe it’s true, honey.”

Her great-grandparents Amelie and Thomas Van Damme were buried behind the church. Their headstone sat in front of us—gray and weathered, a couple inches thick, a foot wide and three feet high, with a chipped, arched edge.

I said, “Maybe what they were really remembering was the Communion wafers. They’re white, just like divinity fudge. Maybe Sister Adele made sweet wafers, and thus people just said they were sweet as fudge. They both melt on the tongue, after all.”

“No, Ava, my grandparents were pious. They would not have joked about that. They weren’t eating fudge for Communion.”

A giggle escaped me, despite my trying to be serious for Grandma. “Maybe church enrollments would rise if they served fudge. It would be a whole new market for me.”

“Honey, please be respectful. Your grandpa believes there’s a recipe hidden here somewhere. People have looked for it off and on for generations now. It’s time we find the darn thing and send it home with those people.”

Those people.
Her disdain for her relatives silenced me. A little research had told me that the prince and princess were active in charities to help the poor. They had assured Grandpa the recipe would travel back to our community to help with fund-raisers to benefit Door County. The royals appeared to be good people. What wasn’t she willing to share with me? Grandma stood as still as the statues before us, her physical being as sturdy as her conviction. I said, “I’ll do my best to find that recipe, I promise.”

Grandma pushed a pouf of white hair off her face. “Your grandfather will be over the moon.”

“The moon, wafers, divinity fudge, your hair—all white. Your hair is as divine as divinity fudge, Grandma.”