s'mores pie and the baby-sitters club

I think this post was inevitable. Well, probably not the s’mores pie part but The Baby-sitters Club part. This book series is, after all, the main reason I started blogging about making pies.

S’mores are an American camping snack, and a treat I have only experienced second hand. I don’t know if the first reference to s’mores I came across was in The BSC but let’s say it was. The book was a Super Special (they were the best ones!) called Baby-sitters’ Summer Vacation. It centered around the baby-sitting gang and their crazy adventures at Camp Mohawk (if you want to check out the specific s’mores reference, skip right over to page 181). Anyway, reading about people making s’mores didn’t really mean anything to me, since there was no description about what a s’more actually was. Then I saw s’mores being made in a film, (might it have been The Sandlot Kids?) and it all clicked. S’mores are all about graham crackers, chocolate and a partially melted-over-a-camp-fire marshmallow. How yum does that sound? But graham crackers aren’t really something you can find in Australian supermarkets and I hate camping. So that ended that.

Childhood went on, as did my teens and twentys (gulp) before I revisited this American treat. I was initially inspired by the guest post from the blog Confessions of a Cookbook Queen, which introduced me to the idea of making s'mores into a pie. But then thought there were one too many sweet ingredients in that particular recipe, so I headed over to allrecipes.com and found what I was looking for.

Now, the trick with this pie was finding the ingredients. They were extremely American specific and I knew Coles wouldn’t be much help. Thankfully, I am a frequenter of USA Foods (both the physical store and ordering online) so I knew I’d be able to find what I needed, specifically marshmallow fluff, graham cracker crust crumbs and chocolate pudding.

I made the pie crust out of the crumbs and popped it into the oven to cook and then the fridge to chill. Next I made the chocolate pudding, which mainly consisted of stirring the chocolate powder mixed with milk until it boiled and thickened. Time to assemble! Marshmallow fluff is a sticky bitch. My god. It was an effort to spread it over the base but we got there in the end.

Over that went the chocolate pudding and then the pie had to set.

I’m sure you can imagine just how sweet this pie was. And it’s not a keeper. You pretty much have to eat it the day you make it. But I really enjoyed putting it together because of the ingredients I was introduced to and because it made me re-read Baby-sitters’ Summer Vacation just so I could find the exact page where they mentioned making s’mores. Good times.

Next stop Apple Pie and Archie comics!