New Year’s. A phrase that usually has us thinking of parties, champagne, and cheering, along with eating all sorts of wonderful food!
For New Year’s Eve in 2020, I decided to try and do something nice at home. I was at a local supermarket, Homeplus, and I saw a fondue kit on sale! It included two different types of chocolate, marshmallows, and roasting sticks for to put the marshmallows on. It was super cheap, so I decided to buy it and save it for New Year’s Eve.
To prepare for the wonderful fondue, I even bought some fresh strawberries, which are very expensive right now in South Korea, as it’s wintertime.
The fondue set is made by a company called Nawarra, which from my searching the Internet, appears to be a company out of Germany. The product in question, the Schoko BBQ Fonduette, looked like so much fun, and I was so excited to try it.
So, as New Year’s Eve arrived, I got everything ready for my fondue evening. I washed the strawberries, and then opened the Schoko BBQ Fonduette box.
The box was neatly packed, and as mention above, had the following items.
White chocolate chips…
Dark chocolate chips….
Marshmallows
Wooden Skewers
After unpacking and getting everything ready, it was time to start melting the chocolate.
Now, I’ve never prided myself on being an outstanding cook, and this was on full display with the fondue set.
The first thing I tried to melt the chocolate was putting the trays in a frying pan, to simulate the barbecue style of heating. This did not go well, as they barely melted at all.
Next, I thought perhaps the toaster oven, with heat on the top and bottom, would be a better choice to melt the chocolate chips. This also was not very successful, and actually started to toast the chocolate pieces.
Then, I tried the larger gas oven, but this also failed.
Next, I tried a hot-water bath and put the chocolate chips in a metal bowl to try and melt them this way, which was also a spectacular failure.
Finally, as a last resort, I checked on-line, and someone had written they had great results with a frying pan. This was very bad advice, and I ended up with a bunch of lumpy, congealed, hard chocolate.
Needless to say, I was very disappointed at this fondue disaster! I did get to enjoy some strawberries, but that was about it for New Year’s Eve.
Fortunately, a few days later I had a stroke of inspiration, and after not throwing out the lumps of chocolate, I decided to use them to make hot chocolate!
This turned out to be a rousing success! The chocolate lumps melted in the milk, and created a rich, creamy, and frothy (thanks to my old school beater!) mug of hot chocolate.
So, I don’t really know how this fondue set works for its original purpose, but the chocolate was very tasty. Also, I toasted the marshmallows, and they were also delicious. Toasted marshmallows really make a wonderful addition to a mug of hot cocoa!