Home › Cake Fillings and Frosting › Marshmallow Paste
Marshmallow Paste
3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup milk 1/4 lb. marshmallows 2 tablespoons hot water 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Put sugar and milk in a saucepan, heat slowly to boiling-point without stirring, and boil six minutes. Break marshmallows in pieces and melt in double boiler, add hot water, and cook until mixture is smooth, then add hot syrup gradually, stirring constantly. Beat until cool enough to spread, then add vanilla. This may be used for both filling and frosting.
A two-part frosting: a boiled milk-and-sugar syrup beaten into melted marshmallow. The syrup stage is the hinge, and the recipe gives a time rather than a temperature.
- The syrup is the whole recipeSix minutes at a full boil will take 3/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup milk somewhere in the neighbourhood of soft-ball stage, though the recipe gives no temperature and the result varies with the pan. A thermometer is more reliable than the clock; a wide pan boils down faster than a narrow one, and an overcooked syrup sets the paste hard before it can be spread.
- Do not stir the syrupThe instruction to heat to boiling without stirring is there to prevent sugar crystals forming on the pan wall and seeding the whole batch. Wash any grains down with a wet pastry brush instead.
- A quarter pound of marshmallowsThat is 4 oz, about 16 to 20 modern large marshmallows or a scant 2 1/2 cups of miniatures. Miniatures melt faster and more evenly. Since aeration in commercial marshmallows has varied over time, measure by weight rather than by count.
- Double boiler, and it mattersMelted marshmallow scorches and turns stringy over direct heat. Keep the water below the top pan at a bare simmer and stir until the mass is smooth before any syrup goes in.
- Add the syrup in a threadPour the hot syrup into the marshmallow slowly while beating, as you would for an Italian meringue. Dumping it in cools the mass unevenly and leaves lumps of unmelted marshmallow.
- Beat until spreadableWith a stand mixer this is three to five minutes on medium. Stop when the paste holds a soft peak and the bowl is warm rather than hot; if it stiffens too far, beat in hot water a teaspoon at a time.
- Vanilla goes in lastAdded off the heat, at the end, so the alcohol carrying the flavour does not simply steam off the hot syrup.
- YieldA modest amount, enough to fill and thinly cover a small two-layer cake; the recipe itself says it serves for both filling and frosting. It is at its best the day it is made and firms up on standing.
Marshmallow took its name from Althaea officinalis, the marsh mallow, whose mucilaginous root was boiled with sugar into a soothing paste sold by apothecaries long before it was a confection. By the second half of the nineteenth century the root had been dropped in favour of gelatin and whipped egg white, and by the time this book was written marshmallows were a cheap, shelf-stable grocery item that a home cook could buy by the quarter pound. That is what makes this frosting characteristic of its moment: rather than beating a meringue from scratch, the cook borrows the gelatin and aeration already built into a manufactured sweet and needs only a boiled syrup to carry it. Cookbooks of the period are full of such shortcuts, and the marshmallow frosting proved durable enough to survive into the layer cakes of the following century.