Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Chocolate-covered marshmallow treats

Friday, November 5th, 2010 | Cooking | No Comments

While many forms of candy are rather ubiquitous in Denmark, a lot of chocolate-covered marshmallow treats are produced here every day. The Danish factory, Elvirasminde, produces between 1 and 2 million chocolate-covered marshmallow treats daily to the entire world. There are also several high profile confectioners making exclusive chocolate-covered marshmallow treats with better forms of chocolate, specialised marshmallow filling, marzipan bottoms, and all kinds of other variations on the theme.

While Wikipedia currently attributes the creation of chocolate-covered marshmallow treats to Denmark (by way of a now defunct reference to Jerusalem Post…), it is more likely that they were invented in Switzerland or Austria, but the exact origin seems lost in the mists of time. Nevertheless, that shan’t keep me from having a go at making them. Since making marshmallows was rather easy, I figured these treats should be run-of-the-mill to make quickly before guests arrived, but, of course, that was not so.

To create these beauties, we start with a good chunk of marzipan and roll it out in confectioner’s sugar and cut out small circles of them.

These are then dipped in chocolate. Most confectioners only dip the bottom in chocolate, but I find it gives a more wholesome experience if the bottom is entirely surrounded by chocolate, provided, of course, that you use a good chocolate.

Leave in a cool place to set and get to work on the marshmallow interior. While a plain white marshmallow is typical as the interior, I wanted to add a bit of colour and taste to it, so I took out some frozen berries and cooked them with some water.

This gives a lovely dark red liquid that tastes of all the berries, this is mixed together with some sugar and cooked up to 117°C.

Remove from the heat and slowly add wet gelatine plates.

Who says you ever get too old to build card houses…

Slowly drizzle the sugar syrup into beaten egg whites and beat another 8–10 minutes.

This is then, supposedly, ready to be piped unto the chocolate coated marzipan bottoms, or so I thought, but it ran everywhere, so before damaging everything, I allowed it to cool a while in the fridge, albeit not enough.

I sort of managed to contain the runniness, but it isn’t as perfect as normal chocolate-covered marshmallow treats. So, given the lack of height, I call these… rustic chocolate-covered marshmallow treats. The smaller amount of marshmallow interior actually allows the chocolate and marzipan to contribute with more flavour than usual, not giving the exceedingly sweet marshmallow a chance to overpower it, and you could still pick up a very slight hint of forest berries, but most of the purple colour was lost after the whipping. Adding a bit of extra red fruit colouring while whipping would probably have made it somewhat more spectacular.

Normal, store-bought chocolate-covered marshmallow treats can be eaten rapidly, allowing you to easily consume 5–6 in a fairly short timespan, but even if you’re an experienced sweets eater, the dark chocolate, the marzipan and the rich marshmallow interior allows you to at most eat two of these, smaller marshmallow treats. And, apart from their rustic appearance, they were delectable, if I have to say so myself.

Tags: candy, sweets

Marshmallows

Saturday, October 30th, 2010 | Cooking | No Comments

Home made candy will usually always be better than the store bought variant (granted, home made candy can be abysmally botched as well, but with a bit of effort and control it is usually better). In particular the marshmallow, which from the store is kinda dry and mushy will, when fresh, be dry on the outside, but creamy and luscious on the inside. And when it comes to candy it’s practically one of the easiest candies to make.

A lovely mix of 500 grams of sugar and 100 grams of water is brought up to 122°C and once it’s removed from the heat you add in 10 leaves of dissolved gelatine (be sure to add the leaves slowly as they will make the sugar syrup foam up, but not dangerously so).

As the sugar syrup makes it up to that, you start whipping 120 grams of pasteurised egg whites (you could just go for plain egg whites, but they’re only heated by the sugar syrup and I’m not a betting man when it comes to salmonella—plus there’s less to fuss about when young children are handling eggs). When they’re nice and fluffy, you start pouring in the sugar syrup ever so slow. This is really a time where a stand mixer is a great benefit as the mass needs to be beaten for more than ten minutes.

After all the sugar syrup has been poured into the egg whites, you leave the mixer to do its thing for another 10 or so minutes, and then it’s ready to pour into a 30×20 cm shape. Be sure to dust the paper/dish with copious amounts of sifted confectioner’s sugar, this is what keeps marshmallows from sticking to everything.

Leave them in a cool place, though not cold, for some hours, and they’re ready for slaughter…

Dust each marshmallow in a nice bit of sifted confectioner’s sugar and lightly dust away the worst excess.

And voilà, you have home made marshmallow treats. A lot more rich, and a lot more tasty than the ones that are store bought. But beware, it’s impossible to eat up an entire portion all to yourself, so make sure you have friends over to share them with.

Tags: candy, sweets

Boiled sweets

Thursday, December 13th, 2007 | Cooking | No Comments

Sweets. It is the ever corrupting sugary epiphany that drives us back to their delectable temptations. Home-made boiled sweets doubly so.

Sorry about the flash reflection, it’s really hard getting these shots good (either that or I need to work on my photography skills) due to the less than ideal lighting conditions in our house in these dark winter months. We really need to figure out what lamps we’d like to get. We still haven’t gotten around to that yet and we’ve already lived here for over a year. Crikey!

Edit: Updated the post with a new photo taken with somewhat better lighting conditions. It helped tremendously, but we still need to figure out what lamps we want to have in the house, of course.

Tags: candy, dessert, sweets