Oma's Mountain Fudge
We would like to tell you all about Oma’s Mountain Fudge. Here’s the story of our tiny, locally owned “Mom & Pop” fudge business.
In my youth, I learned to make fudge from my Mom, who liked to be called Oma because of all the German classes I took in high school. A cherished childhood memory is when my Mom would make fudge for me and my brothers at Christmas and put it in a special container she made from a brandy snifter she had decorated to look like a Santa Claus face. About ten years ago, I wanted to do something to connect our son, Bryan, to my childhood as well as his Oma (Bryan was only four when my Mom passed away – he really didn’t have a chance to get to know her). Bryan and I had a great time in our Spokane kitchen using her recipe to make our Christmas fudge that year. The next year, I started a tradition of making fudge for the holidays to give to our family and close friends. Well, one thing led to another and after a few years I found myself making sixty or seventy of pounds of fudge each year to give away to family, friends, the mailman, the newspaper carrier, the gas meter reader, clerks at the local grocery store, etc. Five years ago, we decided that since I was going to make that much fudge anyway, we should at least try to find a way to pay for the basic ingredients. We formed our company, Debbie Kay’s Confections (named for my sweet wife) in December 2011 and we started selling Oma’s Mountain Fudge. We make hand-crafted fudge in small (4 ½ pound) batches creating many unique flavors (Pumpkin Spice, Eggnog, Snickerdoodle, S’mores, Peppermint Candy Cane, Black Forest, Heavenly Hazelnut, CJ’s Salted Caramel Chunk, Manda Mint, Morihiko Mocha, Roosevelt Rocky Road, Nutty Irishman, Irish Crème de Menthe, Cherry Cheesecake, Original Recipe, and so forth).
Bryan went to high school at Ferris here in Spokane. He thoroughly enjoyed playing his trumpet in the different bands including the wonderful Jazz Orchestra! Needless to say, the band kids at Ferris have been enjoying Oma’s Mountain Fudge for years and years. We even took our fudge on the road with the Jazz Orchestra for their 2013 “Swingin’ Jazz Tour” across Washington State. Naturally, we’ve been proud supporters of the Ferris Swing Dance and Auction each December for the past few years and came up with our “Twelve Days of Fudge” as one of our donations. We’ve even introduced good old American fudge to exchange students visiting from Germany! For Christmas 2014, we decided to focus on donating fudge to over 40 Air Force members from Fairchild AFB who were deployed around the world. We provided holiday cheer to them and their families back home in the local area – we called it Fabulous Fudge for Fairchild Families!
By the way, Oma’s Mountain Fudge is enjoyed around the world on all seven continents – that’s another story for a different day!
We use silicon molds to come up with many different shapes and sizes of our fudge. Our individual-size pieces are 1 ounce and we also have ¼ pound shapes. We’ve just started cooking up “fudge pies”. These are fudge-filled graham cracker crusts – really cute! We also have many different molds for Christmas trees, candy canes, snowflakes, hearts, etc. Our sales structure is $1.50 for the individual size (which we call an “Indie”), $4.00 for the fudge pie, and $4.50 for ¼ pound pieces. We usually package two Indies together so you can eat one and share the other. We are licensed to prepare our fudge at the German American Society in Spokane and we usually sell our fudge directly.
So, a long story about our family business, but there you have it. Thanks for taking the time to read all this!
Marc Connally, “The Fudge Guy”