The Great Caramel Sauce/ Fudge Fiasco

It's a universal truth that sometimes things just don't turn out the way you planned. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, our most careful planning, research, and testing, it all just goes to shit. And sometimes you get the Red Rider BB gun you've been pining after, but you end up breaking your eye-glasses and the neighbors dogs eat the Christmas dinner and just when you think all is lost, you discover chow-mein for Christmas dinner really isn't such a bad thing after all, it's just a little different than what you were expecting. 

Such was the case with the pumkpin pie fudge turned caramel sauce turned fudge. Let me backtrack for a minute: a few weeks ago, I asked my wife to pick up a can of pumpkin from the store, as I was planning on making a pumpkin risotto. She came home and proudly presented me with a can of pumpkin pie filling; the next day had a lesson in the grocery store about the variety of canned pumpkin products and we chocked it up to a learning experience. That can sat on a shelf in the pantry for a few weeks, until I decided there just wasn't room for it, and something had to be done. 

Pumpkin pie fudge sounded good, so I gathered my rice-mellow creme and vegan white chocolate chips and set to work. Truth be told, I should have done some testing, but sometimes I have no patience (which is what really screwed me over in the end here), and I should have realized something was bound to go wrong when the white chocolate wasn't melting properly. But I pushed through and folded in the rice-mellow creme and poured the gooey mixture into a pan. 3 hours later I discovered, not a set fudge, but a brilliantly smooth pumpkin spice caramel sauce, perfect for topping a brownie or ice cream. I poured the sauce into pretty little jars and placed them in the fridge to store them, and went about my business. a few hours later, i grabbed one of the jars to give to my mother as a gift, and discovered my brilliant caramel sauce had set and turned to fudge. Awwwwwww fudge! The experiment may not have been a success in a conventional sense, but now I have two options: heat up the jar and have a caramel sauce, or just dig in with a spoon and eat fudge from a jar. In the end, it might not be what I was expecting, but it'll do.