I Finally Re-Created My Grandma's Maple Fudge (It's Even Better than I Remembered) (2024)

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updated Feb 17, 2021

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A French Canadian confection made with maple syrup or brown sugar and served as a spread or fudge.

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Over the past year, I’ve found myself slogging from one meal to the next, operating on autopilot to feed my homebound family. It had felt like forever since I’d cooked or baked for fun! Desperate to reignite my love of cooking, I decided to take on a nostalgic challenge and re-create my grandma’s sucre à la crème. Candy-making always forces me to be present in the kitchen, and if I got it right, I knew I’d be rewarded with the most incredible maple treat — a favorite of mine as a kid.

My grandma was a soft-spoken woman, her face framed with an angelic ring of white curls. But she was also a card shark and gave the fiercest of hugs. She raised my dad and his sister on a farm in northern Vermont where they grew potatoes and tapped maple trees for syrup. My grandma used the steady supply of homemade maple sugar to make sucre à la crème, a French Canadian confection that’s often served at Christmastime. She’d make us some as a treat every time she came to visit (no matter the time of year).

It’s been more than 10 years since my grandma has passed, but I still laugh every time I think of her scoffing at my sister when she asked about the ingredients in sucre à la crème. The answer should have been obvious to anyone who took as many years of French lessons as we did: sugar and cream! Off the farm, my grandma swapped in brown sugar, and while it still makes a rich and tasty caramel, I’m partial to the maple syrup version. After hunting down her recipe card, I got to work testing — and I’m happy to report I’ve perfected the sweet treat.

What Is Sucre à la Crème?

Sucre à la crème is the French Canadian kin to other brown sugar sweets like penuche (brown sugar fudge), and tablet, a Scottish dessert. Penuche is made with brown sugar, milk, and butter, and often has nuts stirred in. Tablet is made of sweetened condensed milk, butter, and sugar, and is thinner, grainier, and more crumbly than fudge. Sucre à la crème leans on heavy cream for fat and is traditionally made with maple syrup or sugar. Given the expense of pure maple sweeteners, light brown sugar can be substituted and will still provide the caramel-like flavor.

Two Ways to Prepare Sucre à la Crème

Many people prepare sucre à la crème as a creamy fudge, but my grandma always served it as a thick caramel spread. Both iterations start with the same set of ingredients:heavy cream, maple syrup (or light brown sugar), granulated sugar, and light corn syrup. The rich cream provides liquid and fat, giving the candy body and smoothness. Corn syrup inhibits the sugar crystallization that can cause grittiness — think of it as an insurance policy against sandy-textured fudge.

A candy thermometer is the best way to make sure the sugar syrup cooks to exactly the right temperature. No candy thermometer? No problem. My grandma tested it by dropping a small amount of syrup into a glass of cold water. When it cools into a soft, malleable ball, it’s ready. The soft ball stage ranges from 234°F to 240°F, but for that truly melt-in-your-mouth texture, pull the saucepan off the heat when it reaches 234°F.

For the caramel spread: Pour the syrup into a shallow heat-proof dish and let it cool completely.

To make fudge: Cool the syrup to 130°F without stirring to avoid activating the sugar seed crystals that can grow large and give the fudge a gritty texture. Once it cools, stir with a wooden spoon or silicone spatula until it lightens in color. Transfer to a parchment-lined pan.

Whether you make the spread or the fudge, only pour the free-flowing candy into the prepared pan. Do not scrape sides of the saucepan clean —think of those as the cook’s treat. The sugars that collect on the sides of the pan cook and crystalize at a different rate than the free-flowing sugar, and may seed the sucre à la crème with crunchy crystals.

Serving Sucre à la Crème

In my family, we eat sucre à la crème by the spoonful or spread atop buttery, salty Ritz crackers (so fancy!). For the fudge, shower the top with a finishing salt, like Maldon, if you have it. While my grandma never did this, the crunchy salt is a welcome contrast to the intense sweetness of the maple (or brown sugar) fudge.

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