S’mores are Popping up All Over Dessert Menus

Sunday is National S’mores Day, and we’re pretty sure we’ll be observing that hallowed occasion at Hot Cakes Molten Chocolate Cakery in Ballard, which is offering s’more flavored cookies, milkshakes, and molten cakes, along with traditional s’mores made with cold-smoked chocolate. And Sunday, all-day: S’mores to order from a sidewalk grill. Come on.

You’ll have to check for current daily availability, but over the past few years I’ve spied s’mores on dessert menus from Boka Kitchen to La Luna to a $14 version I’ve heard tell of at the Salish. They are a big damn deal at Shelter Lounge, also in Ballard; there, they’re free-for-the-roasting over the indoor firepits.  I ordered them at Bluwater Bistro two years ago and can safely say it’s the only time I’ve ever roasted anything over Sterno at a restaurant table.

Last week I spied them twice: Once at my personal new meth lab Hello Robin, in the form of a cookie (marshmallow-flavored cookie on a graham cracker with chocolate shard on top, to be precise, adorably dubbed the Mackles’more). And next, as an uber-popular dessert at Fremont’s fave fishhouse, RockCreek Seafood and Spirits. There, sweet-salty graham cracker crumbs fill the bottom of a jar, over which is heaped a cloud of Valrhona chocolate mousse, a layer of caramel, and a dollop of smoky meringue with sea-salt and a jaunty fascinator of graham cracker tuile.

“Tastes nothing like a s’more; smoked meringue is not marshmallow,” I scribbled in my notes. “Who cares…this thing ROCKS.”