Remember those days of sitting around a camp fire and roasting s’mores? Everybody goes into the woods and finds a stick and then sharpens one side of it, sticks the marshmallow on and then tries really hard to turn it a nice shade of golden brown by holding it really close to the hot red coals instead of the flames. (Oh, and then there were the crazy people who would stick it directly into the flames and just blow it out because they liked the burnt crisp edges.) You’d take your two rectangles broken off of the full size Hershey’s bar and put it on a half a graham cracker, and then using a second half a graham cracker as the top would pull the marshmallow off of the sharpened stick to put it on top of the chocolate. The most gratifying part was smooshing the top graham cracker on top and seeing the marshmallow ooze out the sides and trying to catch any thing that was going to squeeze out the sides.
There is absolutely no substitute for this experience. But there is a close second – mass producing s’mores.
My friend Marie taught us how to do this while we were all RA-ing. You take a cookie sheet and lay as many halves of graham crackers as you can on top, put the right amount of chocolate on each one and place a marshmallow on top of that. Then you put it in the oven and use the broiler to make the marshmallows golden brown. (NOTE: Watch carefully, there is not much time between golden brown and burnt/exploded. If you’ve ever been on garlic bread watch (shout out to my cousin Chris) you will fully understand this concept.) Then when they’re done, you put the top half of the s’more on and smoosh it all together.
Now, I had assumed that everybody had heard of s’mores before. But when I posted this picture on Instagram, my friend Janine who lives in Australia from Shambolic Living commented, “And you thought lamingtons were odd? what on earth are these?”. So I guess we’re even now – last week she blogged about lamingtons and my first thought was – what the heck is a lamington?
Here is an example of a fully complete and smooshed s’more:
And for all those curious, here is a lamington:
So. How do you prefer your marshmallows?
mmmm… I want Smores now :) and I want to try this lamington! recipe???
hahaha – I’ll work on this recipe thing. Janine?
A friend of mine in high school mass produced s’mores to give as Christmas gifts one year. She assembled each one, wrapped it neatly, and attached hand-written instructions for how to toast them in the oven. It was such a cute idea, and I thought you’d appreciate it.
That is awesome. I’m going to remember this.
Ok maybe this lamington recipe http://www.lifestylefood.com.au/recipes/11828/easy-lamington-recipe – haven’t tried it myself but doesn’t seem too difficult. Still trying to get my head around crackers and chocolate – are the crackers sweet or salty?
Hm, how to describe graham crackers…. they’re not really sweet or salty. They’re closer to a cookie than a cracker because you can get them flavored with honey or with cinnamon and sugar on them. I usually just get original though. If you’ve flown on Delta recently, it’s REALLY similar to the cookies they offer on the plane. Wiki tells me it’s similar to the English “biscuit”, but I don’t know much about the English…
Alright. I got the chance to talk to somebody from Australia on Friday – granted my boss’s boss thought it was strange that I specifically asked her about graham crackers – but she said they’re really close to Anise Biscuits…. if that helps :)
YUM!! My son loves to make these in the summer!! They get brown/burned so easily. I like them very slightly brown on top.
It’s definitely an art form :)
[...] In one blog post I mentioned Princess Child and I had bought lamingtons. Chrystina googled lamingtons and left a comment that she wasn’t sure about them at all. Later she Instagramed a photo of s’mores she had made – I gave the insightful comment that given she thought lamingtons were weird what the hell was this strange looking mixture – to satisfy me Chrystina posted a blog about mass producing s’mores. [...]
[...] ago I posted a picture of s’mores on instagram, she questioned what they were, then I did a post on mass producing s’mores and then she made them – and SHE did a blog post about it. Totally worth [...]