Hungry Girl Recipe Review: Old Time Rocky Road Fudge

So my wonderful sister-in-law, Jenn, and I have decided we are going to review a recipe from Hungry-Girl.com every month on our blogs. This month we decided to make Old Time Rocky Road Fudge, a recipe that uses only a handful of ingredients: brownie mix, canned pumpkin, light chocolate syrup, marshmallows and slivered almonds. You can find the full recipe here.

I have to say, I was very excited about making this. I am a real chocolate lover, and I was having such a strong craving for chocolate that I decided to make these a day early. (Sorry, I cheated, Jenn!) So I gathered up the ingredients, along with my helpful husband and assistant:
We started by mixing up the batter. We used regular chocolate syrup instead of light chocolate syrup simply because that's what we had in our fridge (and I didn't feel like buying the light kind just for this recipe). This is what we got:


Tony was the first to taste the batter, which was very smooth and quite thick. He said it tasted like "poo." I tried it, and I didn't think it was great, but not terrible either. I started to worry that I had wasted a perfectly good brownie mix. But we went ahead and baked up the batter, as directed. We then removed it from the oven, put the marshmallows and nuts on top, and baked it a while longer.

I was so excited to try this, but after reading the directions I realized the fudge had to chill for "several hours"!!!! I was craving chocolate right then, and so was Tony (to a lesser degree) so we settled for other snacks until our fudge was chilled. I had a make-shift "banana boat" (which turned out to be entirely too sweet (bad idea, me)) and Tony had hot chocolate.


After several hours had passed and the fudge was thoroughly chilled, I tried a piece:

To my surprise, my attempts to satisfy my chocolate craving were thwarted, once again! My expectations for this recipe were very high, and so I was very disappointed. While the texture of this was fudgy (but a little soft... more like pumpkin pie) the pumpkin flavor totally overwhelmed the chocolate. Actually, to me, it doesn't taste like chocolate at all. I had another couple of pieces today before blogging and decided that this recipe doesn't taste bad, but it doesn't taste like chocolate fudge. Tony had another piece today, too, and agreed that the pumpkin overpowered the recipe. I would much rather eat a small amount of real chocolate fudge and deal with all those calories and fat than eat this substitute. And so, for me, this gets a thumbs down. Out of 5 stars, I would give this 1 1/2 or 2.

I like what Hungry Girl is trying to do with her recipes, so I'm looking forward to next month's review!