I was recently invited to a friend's home for dinner and she served fondue for dessert. It was so easy!

She just melted plain old dark chocolate (I think it was Hershey's special dark) by breaking it into pieces, putting it in the ceramic fondue pot, then nuking it at intervals of 12 seconds, I think on high. We'd give it a stir and nuke it until it was smooth. She added water, a tablespoon or so at a time, stirred, nuked.

We did start eating it only to find it needed more melting and thinning as it was pretty thick on the fruit. We just put some more water in, nuked and stirred a few more times.

We ate it with whole fresh strawberries, green and red grapes, cantaloupe and watermelon, chopped fresh pineapple and, oddly enough, dates.

The best part besides the strawberries were the dates. They were deglet noor dates which I like less than medjool dates but I think they worked best because they were smaller and not as sweet, allowing the chocolate to be the sweetest part.

When I was a kid, we dipped pound cake squares in.

Sounds like it will be a fun dinner event!

J.

Here, you would add light cream or milk to the chocolate rather than water....- must be a good quality dark chocolate, you can add some booze if you like, but the main dippers would be fresh fruit. strawberries, banana slices, pineapple chunks.......

Thank you both for your replies. I think I will experiment with something Saturday night so I know what I'm doing on Sunday.

On a Chowhound thread, someone suggested pretzels! That sounds good, too.

seagrass

I forgot - think too about something like crushed nuts to roll dipped fruit into, coconut, anything you fancy.

Well, I bought a lb. chunk of dark chocolate. I'm not clear on how to turn it into fondue lol. I have half & half, and Chambord that I'm hoping to use. Some recipes I see on the web have corn syrup in them, some have powdered sugar as ingredients. I really am not sure what to do.

For dippers, I have a pound cake, strawberries, fresh pineapple and pretzels (just because I'm curious about that).

Can anyone help with a recipe?

Thanks.

seagrass

Don't add any sugar or syrup - it's already chocolate. You'll make it impossibly sweet to eat.
You have a little candle under the fondu pot. Light it, wait for the chocolate to melt, add little milk or cream and a spoon of booze, stir it and wait for it to be all glossy and melty and dip away. There's no cooking involved.

We have always done our chocolate fondu using Tobblerone chocolate and melting it with some cream and serving with a variety of fruit....always turned out good and the kids love it.

Dried apricots, donut holes, marshmallows and cubes of angel food cake would all be good, too.

Ditto what mamabear said; a few (depending on the size) bars of Toblerone (the kind in the triangular yellow box), melted with a little cream or half & half--foolproof and excellent. For dippers, banana slices are pretty good.

Thanks to everyone. I heated the cream in the choclate fondue pot on my gas stove and turned the flame off, stirred in the semisweet dark chocolate and added a bit of Chambord. It was quite easy. The pot is enameled cast iron The base of the fondue pot has a place for a small candle to keep the chocolate hot/melted. I had to thin it with more cream as time went on...

We had strawberries, bananas, cake and pretzels as dippers. It was a big hit!

seagrass