Dan and I recently caught a show at the DCPA — it ended up being a rather quick play with no intermission and so we found ourselves not quite ready to drive home afterwards. We had no plans, but I remembered Kate telling me to check out The Inventing Room in the SloHi neighborhood, a short jaunt from central Denver.

From their website:

“​​​​​​​​Inspired by the whimsy in the 1971 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory movie … The Inventing Room brings an entertainment value to your guests’ food experiences by creating magical & impossible treats right in front of their eyes. Using ingredients like liquid nitrogen & techniques like compression, we create culinary creations that amaze your imagination & tastebuds.”

Here is our dessert engineer (my term, not theirs) taking a blow torch to a marshmallow…

…bagging some freeze-dried Cheetos…

…and dropping dollops of Oreo mousse into liquid nitrogen.

Dan chose a butterscotch ice cream sundae with marshmallow, “exploding whipped cream” and a sculpture of “nitrogen chocolate.”

I had the Oreo Space Foam, which was messy to eat but delightful nonetheless. We followed a gaggle of children down the production line and they were mesmerized by each process — honestly, so was I. It was great fun, and the magic reminded me of Happen’s Toy Lab back home (though with action figures, not desserts).