GBBO Season 13 – Week 6 Technical: S’mores

I ended up doing four processes simultaneously. They all needed a little time to work which meant I could swap between each of them. The first was prepping the gelatin. To do this, I put the gelatin in a small bowl with about 1 ½ teaspoons of water. I wanted the gelatin powder to be fully submerged.

While the gelatin soaks, I put the granulated sugar and corn syrup in a pot on the stove. Over a low heat, I warmed up the mixture. First, I wanted the sugar to dissolve. Second, I wanted the mixture to come to a boil. I had a target temperature I wanted to reach. But cooking the sugar took a while.

So, I started whipping up the egg whites and cream to tartar. They needed to be whipped until stiff peaks were reached. I wanted to whip a lot of air into the egg whites because I thought that it would give me that fluffiness required in a marshmallow.

The last process I worked on (while everything else was cooking, soaking, and whipping) was preparing the pan. I cut out a piece of parchment paper and placed it in the bottom of the pan. Then I mixed together a mixture of powdered sugar and cornstarch. This is to help prevent the marshmallow from sticking to the pan.

I then used the oil to coat the pan before I sprinkled the powdered sugar mixture over the whole pan. About half of the mixture can be used but I only used about one-third. This proved to be enough in the long run.

The sugar was still hot, so I wanted to make sure that I cooked the eggs just enough. But I didn’t want the eggs to cook too quickly. Pouring extremely hot liquid into eggs is always a risk. You can still end up with scrambled eggs even if the egg yolks are gone.

After the sugar mixture had been incorporated, I added the gelatin. I wanted to do this while the mixture was still hot. Mainly because the gelatin needs to melt, and the heat will help that happen. The last ingredient that needs to be added is the vanilla bean paste.

I think that paste is used for two reasons. One – it’s more concentrated to it brings more flavor than an extract would. Two – the consistency of the paste melds better with the marshmallow mixture. I feel like vanilla extract would blend as well as the paste did.

Once the marshmallow mixture had become shiny, it was time to put the marshmallow into the prepared pan. I smoothed the mixture out to the best of my ability before setting it aside. It needed at least an hour and a half to set, so I moved on to making the biscuits.

The next thing I decided to make is the biscuits. To do this, I needed a food processor. The first ingredients I combined were wheat flour and wheatgerm. After blending the dry ingredients, it was time to add the rest (except for the milk).

I added the brown sugar, salt, baking powder, and cubed butter into the food processor and blitzed away. The mixture should take on a crumb-like texture, becoming almost sand-like. I had some larger clumps in my mixture because my butter was a little warmer than it should have been.

Then I slowly added the milk to the mixture. This will bring all of the dry ingredients together to make a dough. A very sticky dough. Honesty, this dough felt too sticky to work with. I put it on a sheet of clingfilm and shaped it, as best I could, into a disc. I then wrapped the clingfilm around it and let the dough chill.

The chilling should help the dough set up a little more to be a little more workable. The recipe called for 20 minutes of chill, but I honestly wished that I had let it chill longer. It was still really sticky when it came out of the fridge. But I was trying to follow the recipe to the letter.

So, I rolled out the dough to be 3 mm thick and used a 5 cm cutter to cut out cookie circles. Moving them from the working station to the baking tray felt like an ordeal. Keeping their shape was not an easy feat. A part of me thought I should have rolled out the dough on the baking tray itself.

Then it was time to chill the cookies and then to bake again. The recipe had them bake from fifteen to twenty minutes. I first had them baked for fifteen minutes, but they did not have enough color. Which was hard to tell since the dough was dark. So, I left them in for five more minutes. And they cooked a little too much…

Once the cream reached the right heat, I poured it over the chocolate. Then I mixed until the chocolate had fully melted. The mixture should be cream-like at this stage. But I wanted a more thickened chocolate, which meant that I needed it to cool. As the ganache cooled and thickened, I transferred the chocolate to a piping bag to help with assembly.

The assembly of the s’more was fairly familiar. I started with two biscuits and piped the ganache onto each one. This was to ensure that there was some chocolate in each bite. Well… that was the intention anyway.

Then I used a 5cm cutter to cut out the marshmallow. I forgot to take a picture of the marshmallow block that was made. I ended up turning it out onto a surface that was dusted with the other half of the powdered sugar. And then I put a marshmallow on the chocolate.

Finally, I sandwiched the marshmallow with the other cookie. But what is a s’more without the marshmallow being toasted? Well, I had a blow torch and I wanted to give the marshmallow color. I might have done a little too much color.