It’s that time of year again: summer time! Time for barbecues, hammocks, lots of wonderful fresh fruit, traveling, ice cream, and lounging by the pool. Many people go camping during the summer or find other ways to explore the great outdoors. It seems to be an American tradition. With that being said, summer and camping just wouldn’t be the same without making s’mores!

If you’re not from the United States, you might not be familiar with s’mores. Basically, s’mores are gooey treats made up of a somewhat melted chocolate bar and a toasted marshmallow all sandwiched between two graham crackers. People usually make them by toasting the marshmallow over a campfire when they go camping.

Well, my children and I aren’t going camping anytime soon, unless you count setting up the tent in the backyard or in the living room (which we sometimes do). Nevertheless, on a recent Target shopping trip, when my kids saw all of the required s’mores ingredients conveniently placed next to each other on a shelf, they practically begged me to buy them. The marshmallows were square-shaped, so as to fit better on the graham crackers. Clever! Into the cart the chocolate, graham crackers, and ergonomic marshmallows all went. Well played Target, well played.

The main problem was that we don’t have a fire pit or anything like that in our backyard. (We used to have a small, brick, pizza oven that was really awesome, but one of our dogs ended up destroying it. That’s a story for another day.) My children, resourceful as they are, suggested we use our charcoal BBQ grill. I love to grill, but I wasn’t about to get the whole thing fired up just for s’mores. Too much work and bad for the environment. Wisely they did not suggest using our fireplace, although that will be something to try in winter. And so, resourceful as I am, I did a little research online and confirmed my hunch that it’s easy enough to make s’mores indoors!

We’ve roasted marshmallows over the stove before and they come out so great! We use our long, metal skewers and hold them over the flames. We like to let them catch on fire a bit, then we blow them out and enjoy the warm, somewhat charred gooeyness. I’m pretty sure eating burnt marshmallows isn’t good for your health, but damn they taste amazing that way. Anybody else agree?

We decided to make our s’mores in our toaster oven, rather than the microwave or over the stove. My online research gave me a warning that the marshmallows might catch fire in the toaster oven, so there was that to consider. Feeling brave (and keeping a close eye on the oven), we successfully made the s’mores! As you can see by my photo below, they probably could have stayed in and toasted just a bit longer, but I didn’t want to have a sticky mess of a fire in my kitchen.

They were a success! They’re really sticky and the melted marshmallow squishes out when you bite into it, so things can get messy. My children were thrilled that our little kitchen experiment worked, so it’s all good. We’re going to play around with the recipe and see what we discover. I’m thinking that replacing the graham crackers with stroopwafels would be so indulgent and heavenly. Or maybe we’ll try switching out the plain chocolate for a Reese’s peanut butter cup or a Ghirardelli dark chocolate sea salt caramel square. Mmm! I’ll type up our findings and put them on my Recipes page for all of you readers hopefully this week or next.

As always, thanks for stopping by. ❤