The most common question I hear is, “How did you ever think of this?” and so allow me to share the story.
Peeps always made a habit of showing up in hospital nursing units; why, I am not exactly sure of. Perhaps mothers brought them from home hoping to stash them away from already sugar filled children, or perhaps nurses didn’t want to get caught eating them at home.
I do know that most every nursing unit had at least one nurse obsessed with the sugar coated critters and loves dispersing them in the hospital units.
As was the case in a hospital unit I was working in.
“I like to warm them up in the microwave oven”, tells me a nurse as she sets the timer for ten seconds.
“Here try one”, she says pulling out the Peep on a napkin.
The Peep is indeed warm and soft in my mouth and actually doesn’t taste that bad.
So I begin “nuking” Peeps. Yet, as several people who know me can attest, I don’t have a good track record with microwave ovens. In fact one hospital banned me from using them as I had set two on fire in one month’s time.
Forgetting to set the ten second timer I had left a Peep to roast in the oven for far too long and got my first witness of a Peep blowing up to three or four times its normal size before imploding into a shape resembling a fried egg.
This was way more fun than simply eating ten second nuked Peeps!
That evening I saved some of the Peeps to take home and show my daughters.
“That’s sick!” they exclaimed, staring fascinated with the cute Peeps turning into giant blobs.
Later that evening we relaxed on the patio enjoying the flame from the fire pit. I threw a Peep on the hot coals to see if the same results from the microwave would happen. It didn’t, but instead made a unique sizzle effect before melting into a slimy blob.
Jesse, my oldest daughter, watched the blob slide down the hot coals and says, “I wonder how they would taste roasted and made into a smore?”
And so our annual Easter tradition was born.