Daring Bakers August Challenge

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

And so for my very first Daring Bakers Challenge, my heart sunk when I saw that we would be working with chocolate. In August. The last time I attempted to make a truffle in the middle of summer, I ended up with a bowl of dipping chocolate swirled with melted ganache and some very clumpy mounds of chocolate chaos. But I suppose thereinlies the "challenge" aspect.

Since the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes, I decided to take a different approach to my truffles. I decided to do a molded/filled truffle instead of dipping, in hopes that it would work out better. And though it does pique my curiosity, I decided to not even attempt to temper the chocolate. I don't really have the counterspace/patience/nerves of steel it takes to do that. Sorry, Chocoley, I guess I won't be entering your competition after all.

After a quick trip to Trader Joe's to pick up what was an obscene amount of chocolate, I decided on a milk chocolate orange truffle. It just sounded yummy. I used a half a cup of almost boiling heavy cream with a splash of orange flavoring added to about a half a pound of chocolate for the ganache, and then spooned into milk chocolate molded cups. A few hours in the fridge and they were ready to come out of the mold. Well, I was ready for them to come out of the mold. But they were more resistant.

Overall, they turned out well. But, then again, anytime you add cream and chocolate together, you get the food equivalent of a liger. Pure magic.

But the challenge doesn't end after I attempt the troubling truffle. I still have to make another candy, chocolate or non-chocolate, to fulfill the challenge guidelines. While flipping through my candy cookbooks, I stumbled upon the perfect recipe to fulfill my quest: the homemade marshmallow.

Boiling the sugar, corn syrup, and water.

Sure, store-bought marshmallows are great. But the handful of times I've had homemade marshmallows is making me crave the fluffy, gooey, vanilla mess right now. If any of my readers are from Kalispell, Montana, you may very well know the bliss of having a latte from Colter Coffee topped with one of their homemade marshmallows. The way the marshmallow melts into a sweet and creamy pool on top of the lucious latte still gives me the chills. It's definitely one of the things I miss most about my hometown.

Such pretty fluff!

So of course, I don’t find the time until the challenge is actually due. August 27, the day before a hurricane, I’m back on campus, and I have to make marshmallows. So, I pack everything I own into a bag and hike down two floors to the kitchen lounge and set up camp. I decided to use Alton Brown's recipe, and I was pretty surprised it only took about an hour from start to finish.

They still need to dry and be cut, but if the marshmallow fluff I licked off the spoon is any indication of how they will turn out....YUM! I may not share this batch, but I will definitely make more very soon.

Somewhere under that powdered sugar are marshmallows.

Wish me luck with the hurricane, and at least we've got marshmallows to snack on!