This past summer, when Donna McCue was a staple at the East Hampton Farmers Market with her handmade Fat Ass Fudge, inevitably someone would ask, “If I eat this fudge, will I get a fat ass?” “East Hampton is a very selective, slender group of people,” McCue says in the kitchen of Della Femina’s restaurant, where she used to work as a receptionist and now makes her fudge. I told them, “No, it will make my ass smile.”

After much trial and error, McCue started her own company after a big birthday bash last year. “It was, you know, the big one.” Her whole family traveled from around the world to help her celebrate. As she is prone to do whenever she wants to endear someone to her, she gave everyone her homemade fudge as gifts. It was her very successful brother who suggested she start a business selling her fudge. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “I’ll call it what you used to call me.”

Then the lightbulb went off: Fat Ass Fudge. When she tried to register the name with the state, they denied her. “They said it was obscene.”

McCue’s logo is a rear-view illustration of a big-bottomed donkey. “It’s a donkey’s ass,” she says. More cute than obscene. She faxed the state a letter begging them to reconsider. “You’re not going to deny a little old grandmother who wants to make money in this economy, are you?” Within a half hour she got the name. McCue honed her powers of persuasion as a stand-up comic in the city, where she lived for years and variously worked as an actress, a palmist, a hat-check girl, an exercise instructor, a stockbroker, a bartender, a private chef, in retail at Pendleton Woolen Mills, in a library, in an ad agency and more.

“Every job, I seemed to be let go,” she says. “My personality is so dynamic.” She met her husband, who thankfully holds a steady job, when she read his palm and declared, “You’re going to marry me.” The couple had two boys and moved to Springs.

Things didn’t change too much. “Living in the Hamptons, you have to hold down a lot of jobs,” she says. She became a radio and cable television personality with The Donna McCue Show and wrote a book, Your Fate Is in Your Hands: Using the Principle of Palmistry to Change Your Life. In fact, it was her book publicist who was the “angel” backer for the fudge business.

McCue began making fudge as a youngster with her grandmother in Syracuse, New York. As an adult, every time she needed a little pick-me-up, she whipped up a batch of her grandmother’s fudge, which filled her with comforting old memories. “I got really good at making fudge,” she says with a chuckle.

She tweaked the family recipe, bringing it “to the highest level” with organic goat milk, organic sugar, vanilla bean, a little butter, and Belgian chocolate. She is so secretive about her perfected recipe, even her mother does not know.

But Joe Cipro, a chef at Della Femina’s, knows. “He’s the only one,” she says of her kitchen assistant. “I tell him to talk to it like a lover while he stirs, like, ‘You’re getting warm and creamy, you’re bubbling, you’re getting sticky.’”

The final product is cut into “portion control” pieces and wrapped individually. She says it’s best to freeze them and take out one piece every night and eat it with a glass of wine.

“Everyone deserves that,” says McCue, still available for hire as a palmist even if fudge has become her true therapeutic calling.

“It’s really medicine.”