Substitution in text files

[Angel]

Ok getting hammered by something that should not be that difficult again. I want to take a hash and substitute the keys with $keyname from a text file and place the hash value in it's place. I tried and tried and I cant get it to do the substitution

    #hash that contins the data
    %recordData = %$hashRef;

    #gets the email address
    $emailAddress = $recordData{ "EmailAddress" };
    $message = $original_message;

    local($/) = undef;

    foreach $key (keys %recordData)
    {
       my $subVar = $recordData{$key};

       my $subKey = "\$" . $key;

       # prints the data to the screen ( debugging )
       print "$subKey = $subVar\n";

       $message =~ s/\$subKey/$subVar/o;

       print "$message";
    }

any clue on how to get this to work?