One of the most common questions I am asked is “how do you make this fudge so silky?” My answer is this, I make it with the best chocolate I can find. SilkFudge ingredients are simple, great quality chocolate, cream, butter and sugar. I make it in small four pound batches and taste each batch to make sure there isn’t any sugar grain.
The fudge recipe came from my mother, who was a great candy maker. I have wonderful memories of her plates of Christmas candy that she gave out to friends and neighbors. I kept that same tradition when I had my own children and found that there was a lot of interest in my fudge, people asked for more.
About ten years ago we took our family to a wonderful amusement park located in California, (we’ll keep the name of the park to ourselves but you can guess). As we were leaving the Park I bought a half pound of fudge from one of their many candy stores as a treat to eat on the long drive home. I was expecting amazing fudge to equal the experience of the amusement park but found it to be awful. I had my family taste the grainy, sweet cocoa tasting mixture and asked them “who makes better fudge than _____________ (the unspoken name of the amusement park we just visited)? It was on this trip home that my husband and I came up with a plan to have our own fudge business and the first thing I needed was a kitchen to make that fudge – way easier said than done!
After reviewing several options, the one that best fit our situation was to build a house and include a second commercial kitchen in the design. The original SilkFudge kitchen is located in the home that our family built overlooking the Missouri River in Pierre, South Dakota.
Most of our sales those first few years were by word of mouth in Pierre and the surrounding areas. Soon we began to have several businesses locally and out of state that used our fudge for corporate gifts. Corporate gifts became our main source of sales but dropped off dramatically as the national economy began to struggle. We knew at that point that we needed to make a change if we wanted to continue with our little fudge business. Pierre, as wonderful as it had been to us, is a smaller community and could not support the growth we hoped to see in our business.
On the way home from dropping off our youngest child at college, Scott and I created a bucket list to distract us from the sadness of being empty nesters. My bucket list included having a store front for our fudge. Sixteen months later a friend of ours told us about a store front opening and within a short amount of time we were able to open our new store front in Keystone, South Dakota.
Why Keystone? We love the Black Hills of South Dakota. Keystone is a small community located close to Mt. Rushmore where literally millions of cars drive through each year, some of them stop in the charming town of Keystone. We felt it was a good fit for SilkFudge. During the tourist season SilkFudge is made at the Keystone location, during the Holiday season SilkFudge it made in the Pierre location.
My husband named our company SilkFudge to make a statement about the texture of our fudge. You will find the name to be accurate.
