Caution: People with caffeine or other stimulant sensitives, heart disorders or other mitigating factors SHOULD NOT ingest massive quantities of guarana (Paullina cupana.) Massive headaches and depressive hangovers are likely with overuse.
OK. Enough of the gloom and doom. I found this recipe via one of the legends of botanical medicine, Michael Moore. To do this formula justice and to make sure you take it in it's full context, I'm posting it in it's entirety. Enjoy...?
Guarana Fudge - AKA Speed Fudge
by Michael Moore - Southwest School of Botanical Medicine
Mix together:
5 cups brown sugar
2 1/2 cups milk
salt
Add later:
1 cube sweet butter
6 ounces powdered Guarana Bean
Various nuts (if desired)
Boil to the soft ball stage. Remove from heat for 10 minutes, add 1 cube sweet butter. Mix in 6 ounces of powdered Guarana Bean, and stir constantly until the glistening surface starts to look like frosting and stiffens. Add nuts (if desired), scrape onto greased surface, cool until set, and cut. WARNING: This stuff tastes GREAT, but speeds like a mother. This fudge has no self-redeeming qualities...it's just happily perverse.
Dosage: start with a small square, and wait an hour before overlapping with another piece. Guarana is the Queen of caffeine plants (with some hypoxanthines thrown in) and will generally (to quote Dr. Donald Culbreth) produce gaiety, restlessness, quick perception and wakefulness, while slowing the pulse and impairing the appetite. Eating it slows absorption and can extend its effects well past the 3-4 hours you might expect from a similar amount of coffee. The fudge tastes good, the effects of Guarana are fun, but if you pig out on this stuff you can get to a level of pure caffeine jitters that will completely over-ride the subtleties that, at a more reasonable amount, make Guarana so nice.
For several years in the early 70s I manufactured this fudge, packaged and labeled it and wholesaled it to truckstops in the L.A. area. One time I madeup a huge batch to give to my sales reps to take to a Gift Show (I was making a line of herbal gift boxes...teas, spice blends, stuff like that). They passed it all out, the show ended up lasting until dawn, with vendors, representatives and buyers wandering around spending, ordering, chatting, dancing, giggling and kvetching long after the doors closed. The reps returned to L.A. only to find that they had walked off with someone else's order book, had lost theirs, and promptly slept for two days. I did not do this again. Neither should you.
Posted by Evo Terra at June 06, 2003 08:35 PM | TrackBack (0)