Bear's birthday was last week. We closed the book on year number two in typical Lovelihood style by not spending a whole lot of energy on the occasion. School was informed so that they might sing a little birthday song to her while she looked on, unaware of the significance. A frequent Friday night meal of conveyor belt sushi was topped off with tempura-fried bananas. And a small assemblage of gifts was unwrapped and folded into regular rotation in wardrobe and playtime. No cake was baked, no candles lit.
Instead, I took the subsequent weekend to plan and execute a treat, for contribution to an Independence Day party, but really a nod to a birthday we unabashedly skipped over.
No jar-baking this time around, the logistics of re-collecting the hardware being a huge deterrent. Mixing up some kind of dairy-less cobbler or fruit salad would have made for some item in the food line that my allergenic kid could put on his plate, but just seemed too easy. You know what's not easy? Making s'mores components from scratch. And assembling them in the form of a miniature cupcake. The upside, what really threw me into the plus column as I lay awake contemplating dessert-y potluck options, was the necessitation of a fire-breathing kitchen tool. Done.
A cursory Googling of s'mores cupcake recipes yielded few with graham cracker components. Most utilized store-bought marshmallows, which, while perfectly reasonable, offend my personal capabilities as a mallow-maker. A few other recipes passed a merengue topping off for the marshmallow layer of your prototypical s'more. Not cool. I'm going to go ahead and put myself in the s'mores purist camp, if there is such a class of people. While I'm willing to fudge (hah!) the rules a bit and allow a chocolate cake stand-in for the usual candy bar, I refuse to allow any impostor to usurp the marshmallow role. Clearly, I had to forge my own path here, in making a purist's dairy and egg-free cupcake manifestation of my beloved campfire treat.
Not that I hand-created any recipes here. The vegan chocolate cake is a remarkably spare, widely circulated recipe from the web. The marshmallow recipe, a tried-and-true one, was possibly the first recipe I ever downloaded from a website. The graham cracker crust is an ultra basic crushed store-bought cracker (I opted not to go the full home-made distance here) and soy margarine mash. The mini cupcake pan sits waiting to be called into action for exciting moments as these, when the layering of simple recipes produces a two-bite morsel of gooey love.
Cooking with the kids has its moments, but I don't mess around with hot sugar when they're underfoot. And now a new rule: no fire-directing when they're in reach, either. The oven was set to preheat after the kids were sent to the bed and the kitchen had been cleared of the day's messes. Crackers got smashed and bathed in melted margarine and set to crisp up in the oven. Cake batter was stirred up, poured into the cups and sent back into the oven until emitting cocoa warmth into the kitchen air. A molten sugary mass bubbled on the stove to soft ball stage before an extended whipping in the stand mixer, later scooped up into a bag for piping onto the cupcakes and left alone for a spell to set on the counter. At what would be last call for hipper, less home-strapped folk, we armed the newly-purchased torch and put it to work.
What you may not already know about these things is that they make a sound that pretty much screams DANGER. The torch was industrial, forceful and terrifying, efficiently singeing the marshmallow tops to caramelized near-death. The element of danger effectively supplanted the charm of campfire roasting. I'm ok with that, because I still went to bed with the smell of s'mores in my hair.
