Today someone asked me how I made that quick hot fudge sauce for the our banana split dessert last night. Quite simply, it’s the easiest recipe in the world. If you’re scared of burning the chocolate, I’d do this over a double boiler on the stove (to do this, put an inch of water into a pan, then put a heat proof bowl larger than the diameter of the pot on top of it, then bring the water to a gentle simmer). But to be honest, I have enough faith in every single one of you that I think you can pull this off in the microwave. Really.
Step 0 – Get a microwave safe bowl out. Glass is fine. Make sure it’s completely dry, with no little droplets of water in it (as can happen when something is fresh out of the dishwasher). Why? If you add a little bit of water to chocolate, it causes it to seize up. This is not delicious.
Step 1 – Pour some chocolate chips in the bowl. I like Ghiradelli semi sweet for this, but whatever you have is fine. If you don’t have chips but have a bar of chocolate, chop that up and throw it in the bowl.
Step 2 – Microwave this on 80% power for 15 seconds. Take it out and give it a stir. Then stir it some more. Hey, stir it gently! If you stir too vigorously, little bubbles will form.
Step 3 - Pour in some whole milk, heavy cream or half and half. Any dairy product with a slightly higher fat content. How much should you pour in? I dunno. A tablespoon or two? You can always add more later, and if you add too much and the sauce is too thin, just drop in a few more chocolate chips. If you don’t have any high fat dairy product on hand, don’t worry about it. Your sauce will be fine, just a little less pourable. But if it’s going over ice cream, then who cares, really?
Step 4 – Microwave the whole she-bang again for another 15 seconds on 80% power (or if you’re really lazy, you can do it on full blast, just keep an eye on it). Take it out again and stir. The residual heat from the microwave session should be enough to melt all the chocolate chips. If your microwave is weird, just keep heating the chocolate in 5-10 second increments. Don’t try to melt all the chocolate in the microwave, but instead, aim to give the mixture just enough heat so that when you stir it, the heat distributes and melts all the chocolate. Make sense? If you take the mixture out of the microwave and it looks lumpy and semi-melted, this is good! Stir it, and you’ll notice it gets smoother.
Thin out the chocolate as much as you want with the dairy. Then you can pour it over ice cream, or angel food cake, or cheesecake, or just eat it with a spoon (i.e., my dessert tonight). Put a tablespoon or two into milk for chocolate milk (not my thing, but some of you seem to like this beverage). You could also use it as a dip for strawberries. Mmmm.
And it stores well. Throw any leftovers in the fridge with some plastic wrap on it, then heat it up the next day using the same interval heating method in the ‘wave.
I sincerely hope you never buy Hershey’s syrup again.
