I had this fabulous idea for Halloween treats this year. Make two batches of marshmallows and dye one batch orange and one batch black. Then in the last step where you roll the marshmallows in a potato starch/powdered sugar mixture, I’d put orange edible glitter in the potato starch/powdered sugar for the black marshmallows and black edible glitter in the potato starch/powdered sugar for the orange marshmallows. Brilliant, huh?

marshmallows

Unfortunately my plan fell flat on both counts. It took a ton of food coloring for me to get the shade of orange right. I used a ton of food coloring times two in attempting to make black food coloring.  Supposedly yellow, red, and blue in equal quantities make black.  I could never get past brown, even after dumping two whole bottles of food coloring into the marshmallows in a fit of frustration.

And then the edible glitter I ordered turned out to be less like glitter and more like flakes of cellophane. I should have gotten glitter dust, though who knows if it would have worked. Something was off with the orange marshmallows, and the “glitter” kind of melted into them. Looks a bit like mold, don’t you think? Neither of the marshmallows tasted quite right, I’m blaming in on all the dye.

I still think it’s a brilliant idea and am going to try again next year with high quality food coloring and glitter dust. Or maybe luster dust.  I also wonder about rolling the marshmallows in colored granulated sugar instead of cornstarch/powdered sugar/glitter, like Peeps.  Perhaps I should try both, just for good measure.  Oh, and another note for next year–taste the marshmallows before serving them to guests.  That might be the most important change of all.

Now, what to do with the enormous number of weird tasting and weird looking marshmallows I’m stuck with this year?