It all started out on Thursday night when Stacey and I went to Houston. We ate at the Amazon Grille and when we got there the fact that we could make s'mores at our table enticed us to stay. We ate our dinner and when it was time to get our s'mores set-up we were told all the graham crackers were broken. Every one. In the entire restaurant.
Stacey and I were disappointed but decided to make the best of it. Instead of getting a different dessert, we decided to buy ingredients at the grocery store. Since we were in Houston to specifically go to Whole Foods, we also decided to make gourmet s'mores. At Whole Foods we bought three expensive chocolate bars, whole wheat graham crackers, and hand-made, hand-cut marshmallows. We were excited to get home and make s'mores for everyone.
Though it was 10 PM by the time we actually got back home we went ahead with our plan. We used the oven to cook the marshmallows and we discovered that the handmade marshmallows turned into a puddle of marshmallow. While having a delicious taste, they didn't work well for this intended purpose. The whole wheat grahams were just plain and didn't help the chocolate and marshmallow out at all. Fortunately the chocolate was good and that cheered us up a bit. But a seed was planted with that runny marshmallow.
The next day, while having coffee, I was inspired to give the s'mores another try. I told Stacey we would stop at the grocery store on the way home and buy the right ingredients, real marshmallows and Nabisco honey grahams. She concurred though she did try at the store to substitute the low-fat cinnamon grahams.
Using traditional ingredients is BEST. Even the Hershey's was ultimately better tasting in the s'mores. But the cooking options left something to be desired. Neither the oven or the stove provided the right kind of heat. You just need fire I guess. A trip to Lowes just may be necessary to pull this thing off.
Remember the seed planted with the runny handmade marshmallows? The next day, Stacey and I decided we would make fondue with that. The entire family had enjoyed dinner at a Fondue restaurant for her Birthday and we thought we could make our own chocolate fondue at home. Since we had eaten about all the chocolate on our previous experiments we needed more chocolate and some things to dip in our fondue. We bought Ghiradelli chocolate chips in Milk and Dark chocolate as well as strawberries and bananas.
At home we made two types. I made the marshmallow dark chocolate fondue. Stacey made milk chocolate peanut butter fondue. It was easy. We just used saucepans on the stove on low heat. The Ghirdelli chocolate melted easily and we added just a bit of soy milk to thin the concoctions. We cut up bananas and strawberries and also used left over graham crackers and regular marshmallows for dipping. The secret ingredient for the peanut butter fondue was our favorite peanut butter in the world, White Chocolate Wonderful We buy this at our Krogers and it is great.
We had some wooden skewers for dipping. We put all the things to dip on a big white platter, gave everyone a pretty paper plate and napkin, and put four small warmed ramekins on the table.
That was a wonderful dessert.
