marshmallows [12in2012]

marshmallows tend to divide people as much as mushrooms: you either love them and can't get enough or you can't stand the taste and refuse a smore. i belong to the first camp; jason belongs to the second. how a person can shake their head no and scrunch up their nose to a smore is beyond me, but each and every summer, he does. i don't know if it's nostalgia that gets me - remembering all the marshmallows i caught on fire, melted off my stick and lost into the fire, burned my tongue on, or the few that made it to my smore successfully while camping - or the pillowey sweetness, but i'm a marshmallow lover through and through.

and each and every year around halloween, i make a mental note to make a batch of marshmallows around thanksgiving, knowing a batch should be enough to accompany my hot chocolates between thanksgiving and christmas. and each and every year i forget or for whatever silly reason, convince myself making marshmallows sounds hard.

so let me tell you what i wish i had known before i made these: they are obnoxiously easy. if you own a candy thermometer and know how to read it, you've mastered marshmallows. the technique is simple - boil some sugar, water, and corn syrup until it hits soft ball stage. then whip the daylights out of it with some gelatin. that's it. this year, come christmas, i've got no excuse.

marshmallows
click the link to get alton brown's recipe at food network

if you've ever seen even one episode of good eats, you know alton brown knows his stuff. i followed his method exactly and made one big tweak to the recipe - i made one third of it. the method still worked exactly as written by alton and instead of using a 9x13 inch pan to form the marshmallows, i used a glass bread pan, and the size was perfect.