that romancey holiday, or whatever

i'm, uh, sort of not big on valentine's day. this may have something to do with the fact that i spent the first 23ish valentine's days of my young life with nary a valentine in sight. BUT WHATEVER. in any case, it's sort of evolved into a non-holiday for me. it's just not something that shows up in my mental landscape around this time of the year. for the past two weeks, folks (including karl!) kept asking what my plans were for yesterday, and i'd think a minute, then go "oh hey, we're free, aren't we! let's have a happy hour!" heh. oops. me = teh romantical.

however! once i was appropriately shamed enough times into actually remembering that FEB 14 = HOLIDAY, and that due to some cosmic abnormality, I = IN A RELATIONSHIP ON THAT DAY, i conceded that perhaps i should make a feeble attempt to celebrate.

my celebration / gift / contribution: chocolate fondue. ooohhhh yeah.

my mom gave me a cute little 3-part dip/fondue thingiedoodle for christmas, sort of like this:

(i couldn't find it online. you get a drawing instead!)

...and decided that a Lovely and Holiday-Appropriate Idea would be to make 3 different chocolate fondues, one for each little dippy spot. yay, right? except then i remembered how i've never made chocolate fondue before, or any mildly complicated dessert, and really? three at once? who did i think i was?

however! i am here to report that a) chocolate fondue is not NEARLY as hard to make as i always assumed it was, and b) there are some really awesome and easy recipes out there. i got all mine on epicurious.com. i wanted three that would be different enough from each other to make a difference without being TOO wacky, so i chose these three:

"regular" chocolate fondue, but from some healthy magazine so it incorporated splenda
dark chocolate honey-almond fondue
chocolate and coconut cream fondue

verdicts: first off, all were pretty much FANTASTICALLY DELICIOUS. and easy! easy enough for me to make! that's saying something. however, i wouldn't make the splenda one again. the directions called for making a "paste" out of the ingredients, then putting it over low heat until it boiled. that sounded suspicious to me, and low and behold, pastes do NOT really boil. instead they stay.. pasty. so we added some heavy cream until it was a little less paste-ish, then eventually gave up and ate it as-is. the problem was that even with the cream, it was still really thick and sort of lumpy; not something you could dip fruit or angel food cake in, for example. you had to sort of scoop a chunk first with your fondue fork, THEN spear a strawberry. definitely tasty, but not ideal.

the other two were amazing. i accidentally screwed up the honey/almond one by putting a ton of vanilla extract in instead of almond extract, so it ended up being more of a honey/vanilla fondue, but... dang. still excellent. i LOVED the honey taste in the dark chocolate. karl's favorite was the coconut one, which despite being made with 15 oz of cream of coconut AND some coconut extract, was not at all overwhelmingly coconutty.

we had strawberries, apples, bananas, angel food cake, and marshmallows to dip. and some red wine to go with it all. there are no pictures, which is sad, because it was a THING OF BEAUTY, people. i'm not sure the big mess in the kitchen and the overeating-until-we-both-couldn't-move was romantic, per se... but it was a good effort.