Technical Bake #13: Marshmallow Puffs

Welcome back, Friends and Fellow Bakers! Whew. Unlucky number 13 was a doozy! MUCH HARDER THAN EXPECTED! But I got it done and here we are: Marshmallow Puffs. This is a copycat recipe of Viva Puffs (also known as Whippets in Quebec, apparently #learning #luvucbc). This cookie was featured on Season 3, Biscuit Week of GCBS. Now it is also featured here on Baking Summit as “the one where I nearly had a meltdown and gave up.” There was bound to be at least one, I suppose. Things have been running pretty smoothly so far, so I was probably due for a little kick of reality to take me down a peg.

The Dare brand “Viva Puffs” are an iconic Canadian cookie, but many countries have their own version. I am a bit of a packaged snack fetishist, so now I am excited to try all these other versions and see how they hold up to the beloved Canadian PUFF. Our version has a graham cookie bottom, a dollop of jam or chocolate in the middle (there are different flavours), a dome of marshmallow on top, and then the whole thing is enrobed in chocolate. Viva Puffs are a long standing childhood treat here in the Great White North, and to this day if someone offers me one, I will take it 100% of the time. They are light, fluffy, and not overly sweet. A great packaged cookie all around.

Once again, I find myself presenting “ugly ducklings” here because the inside of these were nearly perfect, but I am not happy with the outward appearance. Mine are lumpy and irregular when they should be nice, clean dome shapes. Also the chocolate on mine is way too thick. I will come back to the the why and how of these shortcomings, but the short version is I need to calm my tits lessons were learned this fine day.

There were a few reasons I struggled with this bake. First and foremost, I started off on the wrong foot due to poor planning. It has been fun and exciting to use TikTok to promote this project, but hot damn, that shit is ***A LOT OF WORK***. It was very challenging to execute this bake AND take photos for the blog AND make video clips for TikTok simultaneously. I think at this point, I need to start scripting the video clips I want to do in advance and enlist Dave to help me more with filming, especially when some of the steps are extremely time sensitive and/or unfamiliar. 

Challenge number two was a struggle with time management, which is out of character for me. I think I just had too many balls in the air and not enough familiarity with the method. I got so frustrated part way through this I was ready to pack it in and just do another bake instead. In hindsight, things were probably not as bad as they seemed at the time. I have always taken great pride in my ability to multitask and manage different components of a complex bake with perfect fluidity and grace. Feeling like I wasn’t working with that kind of ease and expertise just ticked off some crazy boxes in my brain and I SPUN OUT. On top of that, I had a lot of performance anxiety over making the TikToks. I am hoping this will improve over time as I get used to making them, but if it doesn’t, I need to learn to manage my anxiety and keep my head in the game. #introvertproblems

The time got away from me because the marshmallow started setting up way faster than I anticipated. I should have had the jam on the cookies before I even started making the marshmallow. Instead, I had the marshmallow all done and ready to go, then started assembling the cookies. By the time I got to piping, the marshmallow was half set and had lost enough of its liquid viscosity that I just could not pipe it into that nice dome shape. And thus were born my ugly ducklings. Again.

By the time I got to dipping the cookies, I was in such a poor mental state the chocolate just pushed me over the edge. I have mentioned before that I am not a fan of chocolate. I don’t particularly like eating it or working with it. I am trying to push myself to get more comfortable with chocolate tempering, and I have improved a lot in the last year (I make dipped caramels about once a month), but I still don’t feel great about it.

By the end of it, I was an exhausted, disappointed, emotional mess, and I didn’t even want to look at the cookies. So my photos aren’t great either. To those of you reading who actually ate the cookies, I sincerely hope you enjoyed them, because they almost ruined my mental health. 

All that being said, I am pretty happy with how the TikToks came out, so in case you missed it:

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Step 1: Cookies

The base of the puffs is a simple digestive cookie. The recipe called for graham flour, which I could not find anywhere, not even online. I did some research, and learned graham flour is just a coarser version of whole wheat flour. It is possible to make a reasonable facsimile of graham by adding bran and wheat germ to AP whole wheat flour. I decided to make use of what I had on hand, so I did some Flour Science^TM.  The only type of whole wheat flour I had in the pantry is bread flour, which is high in gluten. So of the required graham flour called for in the recipe, I used ¾ whole wheat bread flour and ¼ white cake flour. Cake flour is low in gluten so by combining the two together, the final concentration of gluten in the flour should come out as something close to what we would see in a whole wheat AP flour. #SCIENCE, AMIRITE!?

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I have never made digestive cookies before. These were like a low sugar version of a sugar cookie. Dry ingredients are blitzed with butter in the food processor and rolled out. The roll out was done at room temp which was a bit surprising, but it worked just fine. The recipe didn’t specify what size cutter to use, so I went with two inch. I think the contestants only had to present 12 cookies on the show, but the recipe yields 24. I think I ended up with close to 30, so they probably used a 2.5 inch cutter on the show.

Step 2: Jam

The recipe here was for raspberry jam. On the show, they had no instructions, just “make jam.” The contestants had to guess whether or not to strain out the raspberry seeds, which was expected. I was low on raspberries and for some reason couldn’t find another bag of frozen, so I did a combination of frozen raspberries and frozen mixed berries, which worked just fine. Once again the recipe called for the elusive jam sugar, which I have gotten good at replicating myself using apple pectin.

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The fruit and sugar are boiled down together. I threw mine into the food processor to puree everything and put it back on the heat to cook. The pectin needs to cook at temp for a while, and some of the water needs to evaporate to get a proper gel consistency. Once the mixture had thickened sufficiently, I strained it out and left it to cool.

Step 3: Marshmallow

The marshmallow starts with sugar syrup cooked to 240F. I was happy I got the sugar syrup right first try without crystallizing or cheating with corn syrup, so I am developing some skills here (as compared to the Marjolaine, where it took me 3 tries and over an hour to accomplish the same thing). I must credit the tip I got making the Stroopwafels, where it was suggested to put a lid on the pot and allow the steam to dissolve any crystals on the side of the pan. This works way better than brushing with a damp brush as is usually suggested. THANKS HOLLAND, YOU’RE ALRIGHT.

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This small victory soon imploded as I descended into agony with the rest of this bake. While the sugar is heating, sheet gelatin is bloomed in water, squeezed out, and warmed on low heat until melted. Egg whites are brought to soft peaks and then the hot sugar and melted gelatin are streamed into the beating whites together to come to stiff peaks. 

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I should have had the egg whites started sooner so the syrup was still warm/hot by the time I needed to stream it into the mix. Since I was trying to be a film crew and a baker at the same time, the syrup had almost completely cooled and there was a bit of crystallization on top, but I forged ahead. It all worked in the end, but the egg whites should have been cooked a bit more by the sugar so the marshmallow came out a bit wet. 

Step 4: Assemble

As I mentioned above, I should have already put the jam on the cookies before I even started the marshmallow. Live and learn. Instead, I was stuck playing beat the clock against rapidly setting gelatin and panic set in fast and hard. 

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The jam gets spooned or piped onto the cookies leaving a half inch border around the edges. Marshmallow is piped on top to cover. It should be in a dome shape, but due to the solidification of gelatin, I wasn’t able to get that nice soft serve look. Accepting this, I just had to refocus on making sure the jam was covered completely so the cookies would have enough structural integrity to survive being dipped in the chocolate without falling apart.

Step 5: Chocolate Dip

On top of my inherent bias against working with chocolate, I was my own worst enemy here because I prefer to do what is probably the slowest tempering method. I like to do “seeding” (and this is the method outlined in the recipe for this challenge): chocolate is heated to 122F, removed from heat, seeded with unmelted chocolate, then allowed to come back down to 84F. Once it is at low temp, it gets put back on the heat and brought back up 89F (temperatures vary slightly for different types of chocolate). The chocolate is kept at or over 85F while working to keep it in temper. It’s a whole thing. It’s stressful and difficult and I was just NOT in the headspace to do it well, or so I thought at the time. Adding insult to injury is the fact that I usually work with Belgian Chocolate Wafers, and now realize these are better for moulding rather than coating. I am going to switch to couverture chocolate for any future dipping for this project because that will create a thinner chocolate coating. The melted wafers are a highly viscous chocolate, even when in temper, so they made a very thick coating on my cookies. The unfortunate corollary of this is I also used up wayyyyy more chocolate than the recipe called for. As a result, I had to repeatedly re-temper chocolate just to get the bake done, and it took HOURS. I used all the fresh chocolate I bought for the bake, so I had to dig out my scrap chocolate in order to get all of the cookies covered. I didn’t feel confident the old stuff would even temper at all after being used so many times before.

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The cookies are dipped in the tempered chocolate and left to harden. I was in full blown freak out mode by the time I finished these and I was convinced none of my chocolate was tempered. The next morning when I was cleaning up and putting away the leftovers, it was both grounding and validating to break up the leftover mass and hear that one of a kind SNAP that only happens when chocolate is right and properly tempered. I guess I am improving after all, however much my treacherous neurotransmitters are determined to make me feel otherwise.

Now that some time has passed since I somehow completed these monsters, I have some perspective. I learned some valuable lessons both about this particular recipe, but also about the different components, the techniques applied, and the way I need to approach photographing and filming this work to present here. I walked away from this bake very discouraged because they took me forever to do and I wasn’t happy with how they looked. I now realize that I learned so much about baking while I struggled through this that I actually got a lot out of it. So that’s a pretty cool feeling, since it’s basically the whole purpose of doing this project in the first place. I ate one of these right before I started writing this, and they really are delicious and well made. I was just frustrated because I am a crazy person  I didn’t make them as good as I wanted them to be. This frustration kicked over into full fledged anxiety because it isn’t easy to put my work out here for the world to see. I want to present good, clean work, but sometimes the baking gods have other things in mind. I know this and must remember that first and foremost I am here to learn. And so I continue on my expedition. One more mystery uncovered – head up, ready to face whatever comes my way. See you next time.

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