If you’re a kid, these memories will be fresh (could it have even been yesterday!?). If you’re an adult, the heartbreak never fades.
You’re walking through a grocery store, and you turn the corner. You come face to face with Cadbury Cream Eggs and sparkly marshmallow Peeps. Your eyes widen, your mouth waters, and you turn to see the patented parental “No Face.”
No, you can’t eat sugar covered marshmallows at 9:00 in the morning. No, you can’t have your first what-is-this-and-why-do-I-love-it cream egg moment of the season.
But because we’re all kids-at-heart, we’re here with a loophole!
If you make candy at home, we think you can eat it whenever you want (at least, that’s our rule…). Cream eggs are a little complicated—though not impossible—but homemade Marshmallow Spring Treats are just the right mix of fun and easy, and also, they taste so much better than the ones you get at the store.
To start, you make marshmallows, which are cooked sugar, whipped until it’s fluffy, to which you then add melted gelatin.
Why would anyone cook sugar? Button up your lab coats, friends, because we’re about to talk food science!
To keep it simple: we can mix sugar and water to create different types of syrups. Depending on how much water is in a hot sugar syrup, when the mixture cools, it will either be soft, like gooey caramel, or hard, like a lollipop.
You can think of it backwards. Imagine a bowl of cereal. It starts dry and crunchy, but as you slowly add milk, it gets softer and softer and softer. That’s what’s happening to the sugar, but instead of adding water (or milk!), we’re taking it away.
Cooking sugar removes the water from the syrup through evaporation. Evaporation is when water goes from its liquid form to its vapor form and leaves the pot as steam going into the air. As the water boils in the pot and then evaporates, the sugar goes through different stages of texture, from soft and gooey to hard and crunchy. Eventually, when there is no water left at all, it turns brown—and that’s caramel!
For marshmallows, we cook the sugar to the Soft Ball stage, which we measure by temperature (a thermometer in the syrup will read 240°F when the right amount of water has evaporated). This means when the sugar cools, it will be soft enough to roll into a ball. That means it will also be soft enough to pour in a mixer and whip like whipped cream. This will make the sugar airy, fluffy, and light, like a marshmallow. Then we add gelatin to help make it chewy, instead of just sticky.
Once you’ve done all of the science, you spread the marshmallows into a pan and let it cool. Once it’s ready, you’ll be able to use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. You’ll roll the shapes in colored sugar to help keep them from sticking to each other, and then, the whole reason we’re here: YOU EAT THEM!
The treats will keep in a tightly sealed container for a few days, but they’re best when they’re fresh.