A Mallow Delight

The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.


After last month's success with the Bakewell Tart/Pudding/Quiche, we were delighted to find another exciting recipe on this month's challenge. Homemade marshmallows, chocolate and cookie? Sounds like a perfect summer treat.

This summer has flown by for both Erica and me, and we were lucky enough to have a perfect social venue for this month's challenge (between summer jobs, journal responsibilities and vacation, it's been difficult to find time to do much of anything!). But this month, we were having an actual party, and it proved to be a great time to show off our baking skills.

We had originally planned to do both cookies, but our usually plentiful supply of eggs left something to be desired - so the mallows-only it was!

Making the marshmallow provided an opportunity to *finally* use a xmas stocking stuffer - a candy thermometer! I had decided I needed one after the caramel sauce incident, but this was our first time using it.

But despite the fancy thermometer, a bottle of two-buck chuck substituted for a rolling pin.

We had a little bit of stickiness when it came time to make the marshmallows, but some fast spinning on the kitchen aid did the trick.

Piping the marshmallows reminded me of one of my favorite recipes (and food blogs!).

After our first dunk, we realized that they looked rather... well, you can supply the term (and shiny wasn't what I was thinking of).

So we decided to spruce it up a bit, trying the fantastically eighties splatter art featured above, and the oh-so-classy powdered sugar option shown below.


Glad we've gotten back in the groove of things!

~ Sara & Erica