Marshmallows

I think one of my favourite things about camping are the s’mores. Graham crackers with melted chocolate and ooey gooey toasted marshmallow squished in between. Accompanied by a glass of cold milk. YUM. But yeah, when I first started baking, joyofbaking.com was basically my go-to-guide for baking. I really like that website because the creator, Stephanie, always puts really cool histories of the recipe into her introductions.

I just talk about what I like and why I started making it. It was a pretty time consuming process but I had my friend Deirdre help me out with these and we got some pretty amazing pictures! There’s particularly one shot that Deirdre had that was EPIC! You guys can see it down below.

Original Recipe

Ingredients:

2 gelatin packages of 15mL
2 cups of sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup cold water
2 tsp vanilla extract
icing sugar for dusting

Directions:

1. Spray a 9×13 inch pan with non-stick spray and then line the bottom with parchment paper. Dust the entire pan with icing sugar.

2. You’re going to have to use a hand mixer or stand mixer of some sort for this recipe, so in the bowl that you’ll mix the ingredients in, combine 1/2 cup cold water and gelatin and let the gelatin settle. It’ll turn into this weird grainy mixture.
3. In a small pot, combine the sugar, corn syrup, salt, and 1/2 cup water and stir over medium heat until it starts to boil.
4. Once it’s bubbling, stop stirring and let boil until 240F. Make sure you actually go until 240F, I only went to 235F because I find that my thermometre reads slowly, but my marshmallows turned out really gooey.

5. At 240F, slowly trickle the hot mixture into your mixing bowl with your mixer on low.

6. Gradually bring it up to high to get it super fluffy! This’ll take about 10 minutes to triple in volume.

LOOK HOW COOL IT LOOKS. Yay high shutter speed and whirring mixers =D

7. Once tripled in volume, add 2 tsp of vanilla extract. Thanks Deirdre for this WICKED shot!

8. Continue to mix on high until the vanilla’s incorporated.

9. Spoon it out into your prepared pan.

10. Dust the top with icing sugar, then let sit for 12 hours to set. I know it sounds like a lot, but when I tried to cut it after 10 hours it was still super gooey. I actually probably waited for about 18 hours, cause waking up at 4 am was not an option for me.

11. Once set, run a butter knife around the edge to loosen it from the pan. Invert it onto a icing sugar dusted surface and use the butter knife to loosen the mixture off of the parchment paper.

12. Coat it in icing sugar and use a sharp knife or scissors to cut them into squares. Dunk them in icing sugar or else they’ll be sticking to anything and eveeeerrrryyything. Mine were. Well they were super gooey anyway.

So yeah! They looked SUPER COOL and the marshmallow fluff was delicious from licking the spoon, but I found that the end result was actually REALLY sweet. If I ever make them again I would also suggest actually heating it to the correct temperature or you’re get really gooey ones like I did. Oops!

Special thanks to Deirdre for helping me out!