CrankyCakes

You know, I’m not trying to make a food-blog career of self-deprecation.  I know that if you tell people that you’re a complete loser often enough, they will tend to start to believe you.

So I’m not a complete loser, no.   I’m creative and funny and have a great sense of flavors and textures and sense of culinary adventure.

But I do frequently find my food ambitions a bit at odds with my native talents.

To wit: my plans for Peppermint S’more cookies for gift giving.  Now I have perfectly wonderful cookies I make every year.  They’re a crowd pleaser that always have people looking at me with love in their eyes and requests for the recipe.  I could have made them.  Everyone would have been happy!   But no:  this was to be the year of the homemade s’mores.

So I made the graham crackers from the envy-inducing Smitten Kitchen.

And marshmallows from Alton Brown:

This was where I first erred.  I should have made the graham crackers and let them cool completely before getting started with the marshmallows.  Instead it was sort of a simultaneous production.

While I was saying something on the order of, “Oh fudge,” I began to temper the chocolate.  As far as I can tell, the process is a carefully guarded secret that its keepers obscure with bizarre instructions involving precise temperatures, exact percentages of chopped chocolate, spreading on marble slabs and the like.  Here’s how it started in my make-shift double-boiler:

It was around this time that I realized the marshmallow mix was done and was about to begin to set.  So with further muttering, I scraped the fluff out of the borrowed stand mixer and spread it into its pan to firm up.  After a few hours, I came back, sliced it into squares and placed them on top of the cooled grahams.

I thought I had done what I was supposed to with the chocolate, so I used a pastry brush to spread it on the cookies.  I placed it on the rack to cool just a little and then sprinkled some with chopped candy cane.  (Not all of them, oh mint-hating Mom, don’t worry.)  They looked good!  Like this:

And I packed them away in coffee bags (perfect for cookies).  Then a couple of days later, leopard spots began appearing in the chocolate, meaning I think that the heat had gone too high in the tempering process.  And when I ate one of the extras, the marshmallows that had started so billowy and nice had a sort of al dente quality.  Dangit.  But still:  homemade marshmallow!  Homemade graham crackers!  Made for you with love!

And next year?  Back to the cookies.