Marshmallow Love

Do you know what these are?

They’re Peeps!  Homemade Peeps!

I know they look sort of like yellow spray painted Styrofoam bits but they aren’t.  Well, at least not to me.  I’m sure some Peeps haters would argue Peeps do taste like spray painted Styrofoam bits but I, for one, love them.

I’ve professed my love of Peeps for years and after trying cinnamon marshmallows in December I was determined to give homemade Peeps a try this spring and the time has finally come.  I made basically the same recipe as with the cinnamon marshmallows (I would have tried Bria’s but didn’t didn’t have enough gelatin on hand) but instead of adding cinnamon oil at the end I used vanilla extract (pure, not imitation, please!).  I had looked online a bit to see what other people had tried and considered piping out the traditional chick Peeps with a bag like I’d read of a few people doing but I don’t do much piping and thought most (if not all) of my Peeps would end up looking like the Snuffleupagus Peep pictured at the end of this other homemade Peeps post.  Not that I consider that bad.  I happen to like Snuffy.  He just doesn’t look like a chicky Peep and I thought it would take a lot more time and energy than I was willing to put forth to pipe them all.  Maybe I’ll try it another time when I’m feeling more ambitious.

Instead I decided to give a the cookie cutter technique a try.  Don’t hers look adorable all lined up in the cute little gift boxes?  Yeah, I’m totally not doing that.  I also didn’t color my marshmallow creme but I did spread it out on a piece of parchment (not to self: you used the last of it tonight -it’s time to get more) sprayed with cooking spray.  After it firmed up a bit I sprayed a couple of cookie cutters with cooking spray and gave them a try.

Flower, heart, butterfly, tulip.

As you could probably tell from the above photo I only tried each cookie cutter once.  It took too much time and energy to spray the cutter each time and push the marshmallow out of it when it stuck anyway.  I probably didn’t let them set up quite long enough because I’m impatient.  So after a couple of cookie cutter tries I moved on to the quick and easy way.  I sprayed a pizza cutter and used that to cut – a tip I got from Bria’s vanilla marshmallow recipe.  After cutting long strips I swiped the tops with a damp paper towel to make them sticky again.  Then I cut the strips into squares and rolled them in colored sugar.  Not as fun and cute as spring-themed shapes but still yummy and since they don’t look all that pretty I won’t be tempted to give them away to anybody so more for me!  Now I just need to let them get stale so I can enjoy them the way I enjoy store-bought Peeps.  Yep, I’m one of those people.