Marshmallow you Cute?!

Other titles considered:

It's a Marshmallow World
It's a Marshmallow Life
She's an out of this world Baking Marsh-ian!

You know I am at the end of the semester when my humor gets bad and my kitchen projects get GOOD!

This is a variation on a Food Network recipe that i opened in my browser nearly two weeks ago and have refused to close.

Since I knew i was in for three days of academic torture..

I allowed myself to make a recipe.
                                               Just one.

It was not allowed to involve the oven. 

Making Bailey's flavored marshmallows seemed an appropriate solution.

It was so much easier than I thought it would be, and I succeeded without a candy thermometer! ( risking the ruin of precious baking ingredients - nerve wracking!) Essentially what I did, was dump three packages of gelatin into my mixer with a half a cup of ice cold water. On the stove I heated water, corn syrup, sugar, and a pinch of salt, for exactly 7 minutes, on exactly medium heat, and hoped i pulled it off before the sugar started crystallizing.

AND I DID!

And then I turned Black Betty (wham-a-lam) on for her triumphant return, and slowly poured the hot sugary liquid in the mixer.

High speed, high steam!

After about 5 minutes  it stopped frothing and started foaming. Excellent.

The hardest part, is just letting it mix. For about 12 minutes. Patience is not one of my numerous virtues.

Oh wait, then I added Baileys instead of vanilla extract. Two glugs to be exact. Not as much as I wanted for sure.

Child friendly Marshmallows. Child friendly Marshmallows. Child friendly Marshmallows. Child friendly Marshmallows. *sigh

Eventually it became thick like meringue, and it got poured into a greased and dusted dish to set, and dusted on top a bit more. (cornstarch/icing sugar even mix. The cornstarch doesn't dissolve the way the sugar does and keeps them from getting sticky)

Then cut, rolled in more powder.

Here's a few hints for you

Don't refrigerate these if you don't want them to get sticky.

Much like fondant they will sweat a little bit if they chill too long.

Also if you want to scoop the marshmallow mix it into a piping bag and pipe a long tube onto dusted parchment paper, then you can let them set and cut the stripes into mini marshmallows.

Also, dust you pizza roller with the cornstarch and powdered sugar mixture

The initial process takes less than 10 minutes. I left the room while the mixer ran! However, the slicing and powdering takes a while.

The marshmallow brick needs at least 4 hours to set before you can handle it, so you can make these and cut later

I threw them in the bowl to dust, put the marshmallows in the sieve and shook the excess off.

Uhm, these may not make it into everyone's stockings. Hot chocolate with baileys marshmallows for paper writing reward? And not even boozy!! I think so.

A Wedding Cake sidebar for the day...

So some of you might know that I am employed in the bakery industry. I have been decorating cakes and pastries to pay for school. I have a blast doing it, meeting lots of great people, Red Seal bakers, talented decorators, and all-round crazy people who also start work at 5 am..

So when my cousin's good friend had a last minute time crunch for her wedding, I was asked to make the cake. EXCITEMENT!

The theme was Malaysian ( if i recall correctly...) for the groom's heritage.

There was a unity symbol on the side, and a cherry blossom branch on the finished cake.



I made the cherry blossoms by cutting gum paste with a flower shaped cookie cutter.

I then used a wilton gumpaste tool and a flower shaping sponge, and pressed the flower into a 3D shape.

 The centres were made by putting a dab of royal icing in the middle, and sprinkling yellow edible glitter in them.

When dried the flowers looked like this

The cake itself was a 2 tier, 4 layer chocolate cake with chocolate raspberry butter cream icing as the filling.

This was a first for me using chocolate cake, and the recipe was not as dense as I had expected when baked, which isn't ideal for a fondant cake.. Unfortunately, this made the fondant not my smoothest, but it still looked pretty good after a 20 minute drive in my passenger seat. At least - from what I was told - the cake itself was delicious, and I guess that's the important part. Who doesn't hate going to a wedding and getting tiny pieces of dry crumby cake with thick starchy fondant on tip..

I am going to call this one a success!