Mom made these regularly — more often than pie, even — following the recipe on the Rice Krispies box. I love them, but I restrain myself. The pre-made ones don’t even come close and aren’t worth the effort of placing them in the shopping basket. If I do make them, I spend days thinking about what sort of variations I can do.
Recently I’ve become fascinated with making marshmallows. I don’t really love marshmallows (I’m no Fluff Fanatic, that’s for sure), but I’m intrigued by their chemistry and physical properties. Then I saw people making them out of actual mallow roots! Ok, that I’ve gotta do… but it takes 2 years for the roots to mature enough!!!! I have a leftover box of chocolate rice krispies that need to be turned into treats NOW. I also have half an old box of unflavored gelatin — not sure why, but so it goes with many of the things in my house.
So, I went to my preferred source of recipe wisdom, the NYT Cooking App. Two recipes came up: Marshmallows (which called for more gelatin than I had on hand and in an inconveniently non-divisible amount), and Marshmallow Sauce, which I figured was really what I needed. I followed this recipe quite nearly exactly, except that I used my homemade Coffee Liqueur instead of vanilla, and maybe I used twice as much… And then I beat them for about twice as long because it was pretty wet looking and I got the brilliant idea to try to make part of it into actual marshmallows, following the process in the first recipe. This worked out very well — I had enough to make an 8×8 pan of Very Fluffy Chocolate Crispy Rice teats, and a smaller pan of marshmallows. Interesting they were not nearly as sickly sweet as they usually are, even though they are heavier on the fluff side than normal (ok, I didn’t measure out the fluff, so the proportions might be off).
Sadly, Noce discovered these and devoured the last half of them. Fortunately I still had the marshmallows, so I made them again —this time with bourbon glazed pecans, pomegranate seeds, and amarena cherries.
The last step in this adventure was to use the egg yolk. Any time I make a recipe that leaves me with leftover yolks (or whites), I have to make something with that as well. It’s the rule. So, with the sticky buttery pan, I de-glazed it with some Blood Orange liqueur and beat some melted butter into the egg yolk, and came up with a small ramekin of blood orange curd — really quite impressive as the texture is perfect and it’s not super sweet at all.