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

Cinnamon loaves

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Cooking | 3 Comments

One of the glorious things from my childhood was the sunday trip to the bakery where we got to pick our Sunday morning treat. Normally this treat was to be a single item like a rum snail, a croissant, or the like, but just once in a while I managed to sweet-talk (read: emotionally bribe) my parents into buying a cinnamon loaf. For those unfortunate enough that they haven’t come across this wonderful bread before, it is a butter and egg enriched dough that is rolled around a cinnamon-enriched remonce cream (mix of butter and sugar). For quite a few years now, I have had to pass these things by in the bakery, along with most their other treats, since I’ve been ‘fortunate’ enough to pick up lactose intolerance on the course of my life. Furthermore, we have egg allergists in the family as well, so what else was there to do than replace the butter with milk-free shortening and replace the eggs with a mix of water, oil, flour and baking powder? (We have also prepared these loaves with the egg, but there is practically no difference between replacing the egg as well).

The first part is rolling the dough into a fairly thin square, however, I can never, ever, manage a square when rolling dough like that, so it gets to be square-ish. We smear the remonce over this and roll it up nicely.

For those of you who aren’t experienced remonce-smearers, this is what too much remonce looks like (you will see why in a bit).

These three rolls are then used to carefully braid the loaf (in most home-made versions of cinnamon loaves it is just rolled into a single roll, but that does not get the authentic bakery braid).

After some careful braining and a graceful finish at each end of the braid, you get this.

Now it just needs to be placed in a form and proofed until it’s nice and wiggly.

And after being baked for half an hour, this is the oozing goodness that meets the eye (ok, normally it doesn’t ooze quite that much, but we brought it upon ourselves by using a larger portion of remonce).

Or seen in a bit larger perspective.

Now comes the time to turn out the loaves from the forms.

This was also the time I suddenly realised that I was supposed to have greased the forms.

It’s not all bad, though, as it is still great to eat out of the form, but the loaf in the background, above, is collapsed a bit due to this.

Now we only need to add the final touch to complete the masterpiece: icing.

The best part is, you do not have to wait for these loaves to cool, you can eat them warm, oozing and savor their delectable creamy consistency that is punctuated by the sugary cinnamon and the crisp and sweet crust on the top of the loaf.

It’s still as good as I remember it from my childhood.

Tags: baking, bread, dessert, pastry, 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