This year I decided I want to serve chocolate fondue for dessert at our seder. It is fun and festive without being too heavy after a large meal. Plus, it is a fun play on the seder theme of dipping our food. Why stop with dipping the karpas(vegetables) and the maror (bitter herbs)? We can dip our dessert too! I even bought a bunch of cute bowls for serving the fondue at a local restaurant supply store. Some pesach cake, almond cookies, marshmallows and assorted fruit for dipping and we are all set to go. Except for one problem. The fondue itself.

Developing a tasty recipe for parve fondue on Passover turned out to be far more challenging than I had thought. The problem was in finding a substitute for heavy cream. If I was willing to use non-dairy creamer this would have been much simpler, but frankly the partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil it is made from just scares me. During the year my favorite cream substitute is coconut milk. As far as I know there is not coconut milk available with a Kosher for Passover certification, so that was out. While it is easy to make coconut milk to use on Passover using this recipe, we are having 60 people between the two seders so I didn’t want to add extra steps to making the dessert.

I tried all kinds of different combinations of chocolate and liquid trying to imitate the ratios in a classic chocolate fondue and all of them either had a strange texture or tasted funny. I didn’t want to give up (after all, I have cute bowls to use) so I decided to approach this problem from a different angle. Fundamentally I was looking for a tasty chocolate dip with a good texture when warm. While making a ganache is easiest way to get this, it occurred to me that perhaps I could achieve the same end result using a different method all together. I realized that the filling of the Dobos torte that my husband’s grandmother used to make might be perfect. Warm and delicious before it sets, there is never enough filling to quite reach the edges of the cake because of the amount that gets snitched out of the bowl while it is cooling. I decided to try an adaptation of that recipe and this time I got the delicious chocolate dip I was looking for.

The method for making this chocolate fondue is nothing like a classic fondue. It is made from chocolate, eggs and powdered sugar and cooked over a double boiler until thick. It has a rich chocolate flavor and for some reason actually tastes a bit marshmallow-y even though it doesn’t have any marshmallows in it. I actually like it so much that I may use this year-round, even when I can go back to using coconut milk. The quality of this fondue depends on the quality of the chocolate, so make sure to use a chocolate you would be happy eating by itself.

I am glad I didn’t give up on the idea. The end result made all the bad batches worth it. And I am looking forward to dipping three times at our seder meal.