But back to the wedding. (Which was amazing. Definitely my favorite wedding I've been to.) Our gorgeous venue, Windmill Farm and Vineyards, features a fire pit which they light up when the sun goes down, so what better wedding favor than s'more kits? I found a little inspiration on Pinterest and decided it was an edible, cute-but-not-too-lame party favor I could live with. And look how nice they turned out!?
 |
| Want the template for my S'more Love labels? See the bottom of this post! |
Thanks to my new MIL and her friend who painstakingly put together about 120 of these... MANY of which came back home with us, along with most of a keg of beer, which no one at the wedding seemed to discover.
So what to do? Well as soon as we returned from the honeymoon, we unearthed our house from under the collection of wedding gifts, and threw another party. Free beer and s'mores! We managed to kill most of the beer, but the s'mores were another story. No matter how many we ate they just seemed to continue to multiply. I'd been joking that we'd be taking the s'more kits on camping trips with our future kids for years to come, but by Week 3 the marshmallows were turning into hard little sugar rocks that Dave chewed and chewed and chewed, like huge chunks of hard, white taffy.
So I did a little research on what to do with stale marshmallows. There seem to be two schools of thought: regular people like me who say "turn them into rice krispies treats," and master rice krispies treats makers who say "NEVER do this." I guess if you melt stale marshmallows to make rice krispies treats, once they cool they turn back into stale rice krispies treats. This suddenly brought back a flood of memories of the hard-as-a-rock rice krispies treats my mother made in my childhood. Until they started selling the pre-made, shrink-wrapped kind, I never knew what pillowy soft, buttery crispy-chewiness they could be. (Probably the reason why I never really cared for them. Also, not decadent enough for my tastes!)
So I considered my options and did a little more research. I found some ideas here and here (adding bread to the bag of stale marshmallows, zapping them with water in the microwave, adding water to them in the melting process). I decided on an experiment of my own, which was to steam them. I put a cup of water in a wide, shallow bowl and heated it for a couple minutes in the microwave until it was boiling. Meanwhile I put my super-stale marshmallow rocks in my metal steamer basket, closed it up and covered the top with foil. When the water was boiling I opened the microwave, set the steamer on top of the hot water, closed the microwave door and then left the house for a couple hours. When I came home, I had fluffy, soft, moist (albeit SUPER-sticky) marshmallows again! I closed them up in a ziplock bag overnight while I decided their fate, and went to work researching another use for my marshmallows.
I had decided that I wanted to melt the marshmallows down in some butter but that rice krispie treats weren't all that interesting. I found plenty of recipes for s'mores bars... s'mores pie... s'mores brownies... but honestly, I was a little s'mored out at this point. Then inspiration hit: FUDGE! I remember making easy fudge as a teenager with the jar of marshmallow creme, and this seemed like a foolproof use for my melted marshmallows. At any rate, any fudge mistakes would definitely not go uneaten in my house.
I followed this recipe by Martha Stewart and decided to make it extra gooey delicious by adding Trader Joe's roasted salted pecans in place of the walnuts and a little of TJ's fleur de sel caramel sauce drizzled over the top.
.jpg) | |||
| Ooey gooey. |
 |
| Sweet 'n salty. |
Success! :) Now, onto making another Thanksgiving pumpkin cheesecake with my leftover graham crackers :D
If you too are in search of a use for your stale marshmallows, or in need of a way to resuscitate them, I hope you found this post helpful.
S'more Love Labels
