Tailgate Treats & Eats: Fondue Skewers

As you may know, I have a great fondness for food-on-a-stick.  It's just fun!  It's easy to handle, you can carry it around, it always makes for a great presentation, and you can have sword fights with the skewers afterwards.  The fun never ends.  And you know what else is fun?  Fondue!  So I thought why not put these two great notions together to create a new treat sensation.

Fondue Skewers

1 qt. strawberries
6 oz. bag dried apricots
Sarah Lee poundcake

chocolate sauce

9 oz. chocolate chips
1/4 half-n-half

4" or 6" skewers

Wash and hull your strawberries.  Make sure to pat them very dry.  Cut any larger strawberries in half to make single-bite sized pieces.

Cut the poundcake into 1" slices.  Cut each slice into 6 cubes (each cube will be approximately 1" square).

I used 6" skewers and threaded a combo of 5-6 strawberries, poundcake cubes and dried apricots on each.

Put a single layer of skewers in the bottom of the container you plan to carry them in. Set the others aside for now.

To make the chocolate sauce, in a small saucepan over medium heat, scald the half-n-half. You want to see the beginning formation of bubbles around the edge, but you don't want it to boil.

Slowly add in the chocolate chips, and gently whisk together until all the chips are melted and the sauce is thick but still liquidy. When you lift the whisk out of the sauce it will drip and you can see the drips sitting on top of the sauce.

Using your whisk, drizzle the chocolate sauce over the skewers.  Flip them over and drizzle a bit on the other side too.

Add another layer of skewers to the container and repeat the drizzling process.  You don't need to put anything between the layers to keep them separate.  You can just dog pile them together.

You can put them in the fridge, but they taste best at room temperature so make sure to pull them out about an hour before serving. 

Makes 12-14 (6") skewers.  If you go with a smaller skewer, I would only put 3-4 pieces on each and they will make about 2 dozen

NOTES

You can also use fruits like pineapple or orange slices.  The key is to make sure your fruit has been patted very dry so that you are not adding too much moisture to the chocolate or making the skewers soggy.

You could use angel food cake instead of poundcake. I use the Sarah Lee poundcake because it's the right combination of dense and light.  You want a cake that will hold up well being skewered.  If you homemade poundcake has that same texture, then by all means use that instead.

I used semi-sweet chocolate chips, but you could make this with dark chocolate as well.  The chocolate sauce will firm up in the fridge so you will need to reheat to drizzle.  I used about 1/2 the sauce to make the 12 skewers. 

I had a friend suggest throwing these on a grill BEFORE you drizzle them with chocolate, of course.  If you want to toss them on the grill before serving, make sure to soak your skewers first.  And then you can use the sauce for dipping.