Homemade Marshmallows | be mindful. be human.

C – What’s better than having hot chocolate?

Having hot chocolate with marshmallows, of course. Jessica really wanted to make marshmallows with me. She had a secret recipe. But, we were afraid we would get in trouble for making it and telling you, since it was a recipe of a popular bakery in Sacramento.

Martha Stewart to the rescue. Of course, Jessica has some standards when it comes to Martha recipes. Like, the recipe has to be before her criminal days. When she had her “Martha Stewart Living” show. Any recipe before 2005 will most likely be perfected. I agree. I think the quality was much better back then. She was stricter with what went into her recipes. It really made a difference. I have compared a few from the past to the present. It makes complete sense. We were both really excited by a recipe date of 2004.

Ok, back to the marshmallows.

This recipe makes me really want to get a stand mixer. I have made marshmallow fluff by hand before. It’s a tough workout. Whisking for 15 minutes by hand is really hard. Using a stand mixer to beat the marshmallows for 15 minutes was really easy. We were a bit scared that the mixer would struggle at the very last moment. But, it didn’t. It was all good.

The one thing that we really had to make sure to do was work quickly. We wanted to have blue food coloring swirled into the marshmallows, but they set up too quickly. It didn’t quite work out as planned. The other mistake we made was not spraying the parchment paper on both sides. The marshmallows were a little difficult to pull off the paper once they were set.

Jessica was really excited about cutting the marshmallows up into small snowflakes. She wanted to make the hot chocolate feel like a winter wonderland. It didn’t turn out the way we planned. The snowflakes turned out more like flowers. Oh well. They were still really pretty.

Of course, there’s the taste test. It tasted like a marshmallow. Success! There was a lot of gelatin in these marshmallows compared to other recipes we found. This made them a bit tougher. Although, I think the extra gelatin did help with cutting them out. I couldn’t imagine what would have happened to the snowflake cutouts if the marshmallows were softer. Maybe they would have been jagged circles. I don’t think Jessica would be happy with that.

Homemade Marshmallows

Recipe type: Desserts

Author: Jessica

Prep time: 3 hours 30 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 4 hours

Serves: 25 to 50 small marshmallows

Ingredients

Vegetable-oil cooking spray
2 cups sugar
1 Tbsp light corn syrup
4 packages (¼ ounce each) unflavored gelatin
¾ tsp peppermint extract
2 large egg whites

Instructions

Coat an 8-inch square pan with cooking spray. Line bottom with parchment paper. Coat the parchment with cooking spray and set pan aside.
Put sugar, corn syrup and ¾ cup water into a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until sugar is dissolved. Stop stirring; let mixture come to a boil. Raise heat to medium-high; cook until mixture registers 260 degrees on a candy thermometer.
Meanwhile, sprinkle gelatin over ¾ cup water in a heatproof bowl. Let stand 5 minutes to soften.
Set the bowl with the gelatin mixture over a pan of simmering water. Whisk constantly until gelatin is dissolved. Remove from heat. Stir in extract and set aside.
Beat egg whites in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment until stiff (but not dry) peaks form.
Whisk gelatin mixture into sugar mixture. With mixer running, gradually add to egg whites. Mix on high speed until very thick, 12 to 15 minutes.
Pour mixture into lined pan. Working quickly, smooth out marshmallows.
Let marshmallow stand, uncovered, at room temperature until firm, at least 3 hours or overnight.
Cut into squares.
Enjoy!

We both agreed we would probably use this recipe again. It was good. A few simple ingredients and a few lessons learned on what to do different next time.