Tuesdays With Dorie~Marshmallow Madness

Hooray for making new things for the first time! When I first joined Tuesdays With Dorie and bought the "Baking: From My Home to Yours" cookbook by Dorie Greenspan, this recipe jumped out at me immediately! I have been very anxious to attempt homemade marshmallows, this was really exciting! So again, HOORAY!!! For this week's TWD recipe, JUDY of JUDY'S GROSS EATS has selected Dorie's Marshmallows! Pages 404-405 of the book, "Baking: From My Home to Yours" by Dorie Greenspan. To see the full recipe visit Judy's Blog, or the TWD Blogroll (many of the members will post the full recipe along with their GORGEOUS photos of marshmallows) OR even better, if you have not already, go buy this awesome book!!



My experience with the "mallows" was not so mellow. I think the recipe is good, and I did really enjoy the challenge of making something I have never attempted before, but we still ran in some problems this go around and I'd give our end result a C+ at best.
I was very excited that this was such an intriguing concept that Nate (even on a weeknight) could not resist helping me with this fabulous experiment.
Armed with my spanking new candy thermometer, we measured our ingredients and got to makin' mallows. Because this was a first attempt at such a delightful sweet- I decided we'd make the plain vanilla mallows, and save the juicin' it up for next time.

Nate (even though I was meddling and poking around) manned the sugar and thermometer, while I prepped the gelatin and egg whites. Before the sugar mix had reached the proper temperature, it started to caramelize and so we pulled it off. At that point I think the egg whites were ALMOST ready but another minute or two would not have been a bad thing. So onward we trudged, mixing everything together and spreading the sweetness on to our prepped cookie sheet (which ended up being a jelly roll pan, because that was our best bet with the higher sides...).
We used some ramikins to prop up the parchment paper, and because we were doing this at 10:00pm on a weeknight like lunatics, we left them to set overnight. I opted for a sharp knife to cut them in squares, using tons of cornstarch all the way. I read about one of our brilliant TWD'ers using a powdered sugar/cornstarch combo which I will definitely try next time. Because of the sugar mix getting caramelly these were not snow-white in color, and I think I'd use a little less vanilla next time, but that's just my taste. However, they were squishy and made for some fun photos and a good adventure story. I will attempt the "regular" mallows a few more times before I get tricky with the other flavors.



Enjoy all the beautiful mallows by visiting the newly beautified Tuesdays With Dorie Homepage

My BEST FRIEND is getting married this coming weekend and the weekend after that Nate and I will be off on a camping trip to celebrate our first wonderful year of marriage!! So please go to the TWD site for the next couple Tuesdays to check out what's crackin', I may not be back until May (but sometimes I am able to squeeze it in there, so we'll see!)