Super Easy Giant Chocolate Fondue

This is a bit out of the normal realm of my engineering projects.  Last week at work we had a Halloween Party at lunch, with each department kicking in some activity or fun thing for everyone to enjoy.  I volunteered to do a chocolate fondue.  My goal was to make enough for everyone there (about 100 people) to try some if they wanted, and to make it relatively quick and easy to prepare.  I found a recipe here and decided to scale it up.  The original recipe calls for four cups of chocolate chips, which is 24 ounces.  Since Costco sells a 72 ounce bag of chips, I decided to do a triple batch.  This worked out great, because the recipe also calls for 1 and 1/3 cup of half and half.  Triple that and you get 4 cups, or 1 quart!  So it really did come down to:

1 giant (72 Ounce) bag of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips from Costco
1 Quart of Half-and-Half

Melt together in a crock pot.  That's it.

I used a 6-quart crock pot, and I might have gotten away with a smaller one, but I was glad I had some room to stir.  I also did use the Reynold's liner bag, which made clean-up very easy, but was probably otherwise not necessary.

To get it ready quickly, I deviated from the source recipe's instructions:  I poured both ingredients into the crock pot and put the stoneware pot (but not the heater base) into a microwave on high for 5 minutes to get it started melting.  Then I put it in the stoneware back into the crock pot heater and set it on high.  I stirred it almost continuously to prevent burning, and in about 15 minutes it went from the consistency of chocolate milk with large melty lumps to a smooth, very nice dipping chocolate fondue.  At that point, I set it back to "warm," which kept is just right throughout the party.  I also stirred it occasionally to make sure it stayed smooth.

This produced about 100 ounces, which is enough for 100 people to have a reasonable taste, or 20 people to go quite nuts.

For dippers, I put out mini snickers, marshmallows, Oreos, pretzels, and strawberries.  Far and away the most popular item was the strawberries, and I ended up wishing that I had bought much more than the two quarts I did.  Lots of other things also work well with chocolate fondue, such as pineapple, apple, and poundcake.  Really, what ISN'T better dipped in chocolate?  One of my clever co-workers took one of the apples from the bobbing-for-apples area and cut it up for dipping.

It's fun, it's quick, and it's an impressive amount of molten chocolate!