S'more baking with Erin

Earlier this week, Erin and I had been blogsurfing together, when we came across these. Of course, if you clicked the link, you would know what we were thinking "Oh my god I have to have that!"
But we wanted to try to get an authentic S'more eating experience.

Sunday, the kids played in the pool with Greg, while Erin and I played in the kitchen.

First, we made the graham cracker cupcakes.

The batter was most excellent, although looked, as Erin said "Like puke."
The cupcakes came out very moist - rather greasy, and tasted only remotely like graham cracker. We were rather disappointed, but decided we'd make up a few just to see how they turned out.

So we dipped some in the ganache - which we then decided was far to runny.
And then we topped it with a melted marshmallow/vanilla/powdered sugar/corn syrup concoction. It didn't solidify, and blobbed itself all over before we torched with with the blow torch. Oh, and they looked rather disgusting.

All in all - the first batch was something of a total failure.
Liam didn't mind though.



So, starting over, we went for a new plan of attack. First, the graham cracker. We wanted a crunch to it, and a genuine graham cracker taste - so we made mini graham cracker crusts.

While the crusts baked, we worked on our ganache - added more chocolate and some butter - it became most excellent.

Next, we filled the crusts with ganache (many samples were tested to find the correct chocolate ratio)


Finally, the S'mores needed to be topped with marshmallow. Since the first attempt failed miserably, we decided to try making a marshmallow meringue, something pipeable - by melting the marshmallow and whipping it into a meringue. Tasted good.. and looked good initially, however, after a while the meringue was disintegrating - we had no cream of tartar and we were only torching the outside. It wouldn't last to give to our co-workers tomorrow.

After much deliberation, trial, and error, we finally produced a working marshmallow topping and technique that would torch appropriately. I'm not sure we'd ever be able to recreate it again though, since it was a "little of this" "little of that" "oh now it's too runny.. do this!" etc situation....

Dan's first words after eating one "Those are gooood!!"
He then proceeded to complain that there weren't enough.