Marshmallows. Oy.

“You should totally try making homemade marshmallows,” a friend of ours said in October.  “They’re so good, and so easy!”  She had brought some along on her visit.  We tasted them and agreed — so light, so fluffy, so delicious in hot chocolate!

We have friends coming over tonight for drinks, dessert, and a movie.  “Oooooooh,” I thought. “An excuse to finally make those marshmallows, for hot cocoa!”  I picked this recipe, gathered the ingredients, and set to work.

The first step called for sprinkling 3 packets of gelatin over ice water in the bowl of a KitchenAid stand mixer.  “I don’t have a stand mixer, but I do have a hand mixer with the required whisk beaters,” I thought.  “My arm and I are game.”

The second step called for a candy thermometer.  I rummaged in the pantry, pulled ours out, and held it up for inspection.  The bulb tip was broken and glinted in the morning sun.  Into the trash the thermometer went.  “Okay,” I thought.  “No thermometer, but the instructions say to boil this sugar syrup for eight minutes, so we’ll just try that and see what happens.”

When the sugar syrup was ready, I called Matt in to hold the hand mixer while I added the syrup to the gelatin in the mixing bowl.  He hit the mixer’s power switch.  A sad, strained grinding sound came from the machine, and the beaters did not whirl.  “Maybe the whisk beaters are the problem,” he said.  “Let’s try the regular beaters.”  We found and attached the regular beaters, the candy syrup boiling away on the stove all the while.  Matt hit the power switch again.  The mixer just groaned.

“Okay.  No marshmallows for us,” I sighed.

“You should probably dump that candy syrup before it turns into a rock in that pot,”  Matt said.  Then he left the room.

Trying to think quickly, boiling pan in my hands, I looked around for a receptacle.  No empty tin cans.  No empty yogurt tubs.  I remembered that on a few backpacking trips we’d poured boiling water over dehydrated food in Glad Freezer bags, then let the mixture sit, rehydrating into a meal.  Maybe a Glad Freezer bag would work.

I set a gallon-size freezer bag on the counter and poured the contents of the pot into the bag.  Just as the last drop fell in, the bag seemed to vaporize, disappearing before my very eyes.  Hot candy syrup spread across the counter, spilling over the edge, running down the cabinet, pooling on the floor.

Oh, yes.  Riiiiiiiiight.  Water boils at 212 F.  That pot contained sugar solution at 240 degrees — or more, who knows without the candy thermometer, and with the extra boiling time as we fiddled with the broken mixer.  Of course, of course.  No time now to ponder why I didn’t just let the syrup cool at bit…

“AAAAAAAAAAGH!” I shrieked, and Matt came running in.  The syrup was hardening on the cold counter and floor faster than we could move.  We tried wiping the mess with a sponge into the trash can.  Within moments, the sponge was rock candy.

“It’s easier if you scrape the hardened stuff,” Matt observed.  We went to work with a metal spatula and a metal cheese knife, scraping and wiping and scraping.  As we scraped, we laughed.  And laughed.  What else could we do?

Finally, only a thin candy film remained, which we dissolved with warm water and sponged away.  “We’re never making marshmallows again,” Matt declared.

Maybe not.

But madeleines — our backup confection — turned out beautifully (after a trip to town for a new mixer, that is).

Madeleines we will make again.