Homemade s'mores!

This weekend, I took a class at a local wholesale bakery, Bakelab, to learn how to make marshmallows and graham crackers, and put them together to make homemade s'mores!  The bakery is just down the street from where I live and sells their products online (and to local retailers).  Kristin Feuer is the head baker and was our teacher.

When we arrived at the bakery, in a little industrial area, Kristin had little cookie samplers out waiting for us, along with some cold milk.  Her cookies are amazing!  Chocolate chip is my favourite, but the lemon sugar and the ginger molasses were really good as well.  Kristin does a cookie demo class, I may have to go to that!

The first part of the class was a demo, with Kristin showing us how to make marshmallows and how to make graham cracker dough.  The marshmallows were kind of amazing.  She took a sugar syrup, mixed with some softened gelatin, and whipped it in a stand mixer on high speed.  As the mixture comes together, it turns frothy, then white, then super glossy white and sticky.  The white goop is quickly poured into a prepared sheet pan covered in a cornstarch/powdered sugar mixture (to prevent sticking).  Kristin uses gloves to pat the stuff down into the pan very quickly, because it sets so fast.  By the time she had the stuff pushed into all four corners, it was pretty much set and not going anywhere.  You could tell during class that Kristin is a very meticulous person, and probably why she's such a good baker.  She trimmed up the edges (for nice straight sides) and cut up the marshmallow sheet into squares, which would sit a day to dry out before you use them.  The graham crackers were also pretty easy, with bread flour and molasses coming together with cold butter.  Kristin rolls out the dough very very thinly before poking holes in it (she has a special docking device for this) and baking.  The taste of the marshmallows was, as expected, so superior to the bagged kind!  The taste is similar but just so fresh and pure, it's hard to describe.  I was surprised by how good the graham crackers were, as I'm not a huge fan of the boxed kind.  The real thing oozes deep rich molasses flavour in a crispy crunch.

The second part of the class was hands on, with Kristin providing pre-made marshmallows, graham crackers and melted chocolate so we could assemble. We used corn syrup glue on the cracker squares to stick the sandwich together.  Each assembled sandwich is dunked in melted coating chocolate, the extra chocolate is left to drip off a bit, then the chocolatey square is set on a parchment lined sheet pan.  Kristen taught us to drag each square on the paper a bit, to prevent a little chocolate 'foot' from forming underneath.  Neat trick!  She also taught us little 'marking' tricks for the tops of each square, like using the side of the offset spatula to form raised lines, or dragging the line a bit to form a little triangle, or drizzling a stream of chocolate across the top of each square to form squiggles or other patterns.  These are the same marking tricks you see on store-bought Godiva chocolates.

By the end of class, we all had a box of 12 s'mores to take home and a very detailed recipe sheet so we could recreate these.

This was a really fun class, and I'm looking forward to taking some more classes from her.  In addition to the cookie demo, she also does classes on caramel, custards and cheesecakes!