Whoo-hoo!!! Birthday season for our family has begun! Just before it started, we went on a very nice family vacation to the beach...ahh.. it was refreshing!
While on vacation, Mr.T saw and bought a chocolate covered marshmallow from a sweets shop and he kind-a fell in love. ..
You must understand, Mr. T is not too into sweets aside from his very favorite 'Better Batter Cake Carnival' from the ever amazing, Maggie Moos :) Sooooo.. knowing his birthday was coming up just a few days after we would be returning, I thought it would be fun to make some for his party! I wanted to be sure and use real melting chocolate (not just the chocolate *flavored disks I normally use for candy molds etc.) I called around and found that the only local place to get the good stuff was surprisingly, Winco! If you know me at all, you know without a doubt that Winco, Food4Less, Food Max and the like are NOT places I enjoy going, but.. . I needed the chocolate, so I put on a brave face and headed out.
I was pleased to see that not only did Winco have them, but that they also had 'dark chocolate melty disks' :D Yum! I bought an ample supply of both (hopefully saving myself from having to go back any time soon) along with some white (vanilla flavored) disks. (I totally burned the vanilla melties BTW) and.. I have yet to melt any of the dark chocolate ones as they were more for Little J & I *YuM* (Mr.T prefers milk chocolate) Anyway, I also bought coconut, butterfingers, non-perils, jimmies, toffee and a few other things to sprinkle on the outside of the marshmallows.
I do not have a double boiler or an electric chocolate melting pot thing (that's the technical name in our house) but I do have my very loved & cherished le creuset saucier, which actually worked extremely well to melt the chocolate and keep it warm and smooth. I already had some candy/lollipop sticks, so once the chocolate was melted, I began popping the marshmallows onto the sticks (2 per stick) and then rolling them into the creamy chocolate and covering them in the topping of choice! I learned a couple of things that made the second batch go much smoother and thought I'd share them here (in case you'd like to make these treats!)
- Instead of doing each one, one at a time, put all marshmallows on the sticks first making sure that they stand nice and straight, then finish them as a group.
- For the first batch, I coated each marshmallow in carmel that I'd also bought at Suck-co..er, Winco.. alas, in the end, you barley even noticed the carmel (it was not high quality, and not very tasty) and since it was kind of a pain to melt and coat the marshmallow with, I just didn't use it for the second batch, and honestly liked them better.
- Lastly, for me, it did *not work to press or roll the marshmallows in the topping. I poured out all the different toppings onto paper plates, and then, while holding the marshmallows over the plate I would sprinkle the topping onto the marshmallow while spinning the stick. I saved the top of the marshmallow for last and just plopped it down onto the plate. Seemed to work pretty well!
