A St. Patrick's Day Marshmallow Experiment

With all the hype about our impending "blizzard" earlier this week, I took the opportunity to prepare a little experiment for some St. Patrick's Day treats - Wintergreen Marshmallows.

I used my tried and true marshmallow recipe but this time, instead of adding pulverized red hots, I added pulverized wintergreen lifesavers.  On my desk at work I have a container that I keep filled with these for the staff and at the moment, due to some thoughtful persons, I have a couple of big bags in the waiting at home, so I needed only to grab a handful or so, unwrap them and put them in my grinder.  (I have a dedicated coffee grinder that I use for this alone.)  

What I didn't have on hand was gel food coloring.  I only had the liquid kind and despite adding more than 30 drops, I could only get a lovely pastel green color.  I started these on Tuesday morning while it was sleeting/snowing.  Once in the pan they have to sit for 10 hours, or overnight before you can cut them up. 

Below the entire block is turned out onto a clean counter dusted with a mixture of confectioner's sugar and rice flour.  

Then I use a knife coated in PAM to cut it into strips, cleaning the knife periodically as the marshmallow does still sick a little.  

Then I cut up the strips into blocks and each one is dredged in the sugar/flour mixture on all the raw edges so they don't stick together.  

Thinking about packaging them up for little gifties for a few friends, I searched my stamps and not finding what I wanted, created this shamrock with SU's Swirly Bird stamps and a marker for the stems.  I cut around each one.

I had seen some cute party favor bags at $Tree over the weekend and actually bought some in blue, but wanting these to be green, since HWNSNBP and I had another errand to do on Wednesday, I managed to talk him into another quick trip to the $Tree to pick up some in green.

I just folded the top over a little and stapled the shamrock onto it to keep it closed.   Oh, the marshmallows were packaged in a snack size zip lock back first otherwise they would dry out.

The flavor is very subtle so if I try these again, either I will look for a different wintergreen or spearmint hard candy or contemplate adding a little mint flavoring.  

I hope everyone had a lovely St. Patrick's Day.