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 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 gayety, 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 completely over-

rides 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 made

up 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, product representatives

and buyers wandering around spending, ordering, chating, 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..

SIMPLE SYRUP

850 grams of WHITE sugar (any other form, such as 

turbinado or dried sugar cane juice will ferment)

450 to 475 ml of water

Blend together, pour into a saucepan, and heat slowly until the sugar is

completely dissolved. Will make a liter of simple syrup. Store in a cool place,

but no refrigeration is necessary