About once a month, a group of girlfriends and I get together for an evening of pizza, wine, board games and lots of laughter. Being a group of women, it should go without saying that the most important component of this evening is always CHOCOLATE. It can be dark, semi-sweet or even white …. so long as the primary ingredient is cocoa. This month we met at my place and I volunteered to make the dessert using a recipe from Grandma’s collection. Strangely enough, there were only two recipes in her whole box that had chocolate, making my decision relatively easy, I suppose. One recipe was for fudge and the other didn’t have any name attached to it. All it was, really, was a list of ingredients with some cryptic (and rather incomplete) directions written on the back of a very old telephone bill (circa 1971). I could have chosen the fudge, I suppose. I’m sure it would have been good. But there was something exciting about tackling this recipe that I didn’t know exactly what to do with. For several days, I would just look at the recipe, trying to figure out what Grandma meant - it just didn’t make any sense to me. Oh, the melted chocolate, butter and even the egg was easy enough to figure out. But what was I supposed to do with the icing (confectioner’s) sugar? And marshmallows??? Perhaps the strangest thing to me was that somehow I was supposed to roll everything in coconut and then slice.
…… WHAT????
I’m sure some would look at this recipe and know exactly what to do. I think on some level I thought that I would be able to do that with all of Grandma’s recipes. Well, certainly not this one. There were a few moments where I thought I should maybe buy brownies instead. BUT … I had promised to make a dessert for my girlfriends. Not necessarily a good one, but a chocolate dessert nonetheless.
Fortunately both Karen and Janice knew I was on this recipe-blog adventure. They eagerly said “We’ll be your guinnea pigs, Hali!!” Well, if I had any doubts about doing the recipe with no name before, they were all gone now. Good or bad, we were going to have some kind of chocolate marshmallow coconutty dessert.
I thought it was probably a good thing we would have lots of wine to go along with it, though, just in case.
Recipe With No Name
-
4 squares semi sweet chocolate
- 1 Tbsp butter
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 cup icing (confectioner’s) sugar
- 1 small bag miniature marshmallows
- fine coconut
I chopped the chocolate up on a cutting board and melted it along with the butter in a make-shift double boiler.
I added the egg in with the chocolate and whisked the mixture for about a minute until I was confident the egg was no longer raw. What I had was a nice smooth chocolatey sauce. I took the melted chocolate off the heat and poured it into a bigger mixing bowl. I then added the icing sugar and stirred until it was well combined. This step made the chocolate turn from a sauce into a thick pastey like consistency. It was at this point where I thought that perhaps I should have melted the sugar in with the chocolate, but I couldn’t go back now. I quickly poured in the marshmallows and stirred until it looked like all of them were well coated with chocolate. I was surprised that what I ended up with was a chocolate covered minature marshmallow ball.
I was easily able to shape this ball into a long log and rolled it in coconut on a piece of parchment paper. I then wrapped the marshmallow log in plastic wrap and chilled it in the fridge for a couple of hours. Once we were ready for dessert, I cut the log into 1/4 inch slices. I had to say it looked pretty …. And the girls said it was a success!
So the dessert I made for Games Night turned out even though it wasn’t a dessert so much as it was a kind of candy. But it was tasty, to be sure. I wondered to myself if I would ever stop being surprised that Grandma seemed to know what she was doing. Hopefully that time will eventually come.
I think I’ll call this recipe Chocolate Marshmallow Slices. Some adjustments I will make the next time I try this recipe is that I’ll use milk chocolate instead of semi sweet (I’m not a big fan of the semi-sweet myself), and roll the log in crushed pecans instead of the coconut. Mmmmm …. now that will be good!
