Scotchmallows

As we sat around the other day, Saska was telling a story that involved a marshmallow shooter, and the Homer-esque thought popped into several brains at once: marshmallow shooter could easily have another meaning. Would a marshmallow shooter be booze with a float of Marshmallow Fluff? A marshmallow soaked in booze and lit on fire? A hollowed-out Jet Puffed filled with hooch? Hopefully, the answer is yes to all of these. We immediately resolved to give it a try.

I volunteered to make marshmallows for our experiment. I mean, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. I also wanted to find out if you can make marshmallows with booze inside of them, providing a kind of all-in-one marshmallow shooter. Jello shots basically work, after all. So this past Monday, after getting home from work, I decided to give it a whirl. The recipe I used is this one, which looked straightforward enough to me. The question became: what kind of booze should I put into a marshmallow?

Vodka would have been the safe choice, I think. But I felt like I could do better. Amaretto? Maybe. Chambord? That would probably be very tasty. Megan suggested Irish cream, which I suspect is an outstanding call that I'll probably have to have a go at at some point. You could do something like Grand Marnier as well. So many good choices. At this point, it's worth mentioning that somehow we decided that the right taste for a marshmallow shooter is to have it taste like a s'more. What goes into a s'more? Marshmallows, obviously, along with grahams and chocolate. But what else is an essential component? The campfire. Well, hell, I've got something in my liquor cabinet that's pretty much a campfire in a bottle. A campfire of band-aids. Delicious band-aids.



That is a half cup of Lagavulin and three packets of gelatin in my stand mixer. This was either going to be unspeakably awesome or system-cleaningly revolting. Possibly both. By the time I'd prepped the syrup, the gelatin had pretty much solidified the Scotch into what might have been the greatest Jello shot ever. I was seriously tempted to just eat it and call it a night, but science must be served. In went the syrup, around and around went the mixer, and into the pan the whole sticky mess went to cure overnight.



How were they? Pretty successful, I'd say. The texture was kind of gooey, but I suspect that may have been a little bit of overwhipping on my part, and not due to the booze. They were very recognizable as marshmallows. The flavor was very, very Scotchy, full of all that "band-aid factory on fire in a peat bog" flavor that Megan and I love and the rest of the group mostly finds gross. They're not Scotch haters, it's just those smoky Islays that they mostly don't like. I found the Scotchmallows delicious, and have been snacking on them ever since. I don't know if you could get loaded off of them, but I suspect the sugar overload would get you before you could catch a decent buzz. At any rate, as a proof of concept, it was dead on, and I'm going to make Chambord marshmallows next.