Food Experiments: Chocolate Fondue

Since there are still pumpkin bars sitting in the kitchen from last week's experiment, I decided to try to make something I thought would be a little smaller this week: chocolate fondue. I've been wanting to try it since I found an incredibly easy recipe on the A Year of Slow Cooking blog, and decided that it was time.

Maybe if I had thought things through a little more, I would have realized that a cup and a half of chocolate chips, mixed with various tasty things and used just as a dipping sauce is not actually a small amount of food. I'm very full, and it was very, very good! This recipe is still available in the archives of the Year of Slow Cooking blog (which I highly recommend if you like easy, good food) but I will re-post it here to keep my recipe experiment collection complete.

She notes that a small crockpot is best for this recipe, but you can also put the ingredients into an oven-safe container inside a large slow cooker to heat the ingredients in the same way as a small one.

Chocolate Fondue
I made this in a 1.5 qt. crockpot, the kind that only has an On and Off option, no temperature settings, and made it with semi-sweet chocolate and a splash of Captain Morgan. We tried it with pound cake, banana slices and marshmallows. Strawberries would also probably be quite nice. Really, I'm pretty sure anything short of beets or asparagus would be good with this--what doesn't benefit from being dipped in molten chocolate?

Ingredients
1.5 cups chocolate chips (semi-sweet, milk chocolate or white chocolate)
1/2 cup cream
1 tsp vanilla

(optional)
1 T Grand Marnier
1 T rum
1 T peppermint schnapps
1 T Irish cream
1 tsp. peppermint, orange, etc. extract

Directions

1. Put chocolate chips into a small crockpot.
2. Add cream, vanilla and any optional flavors.
3. Turn slow cooker to On or Low for about 1 hour.

This has been a slow month for adventures and experiments...I blame the influence of February. It's a bad month up here, and it's usually around now when I feel like winter has been here forever and I start to have a hard time remembering what the world looked like when it was green. But, I'm trying to do my best to fill the rest of my winter with some interesting stories, so hopefully things will pick up soon.