February is the New Summer

I was at work and I got a text from Raven asking me to bring home ingredients for s'mores. I went to wildberries and they had Dandies vegan marshmallows- vanilla air puffed classic vanilla marshmallows. I thought it would be fun to try both chem & vegan mallows with the kids.

So in celebration of the unseasonably warm, clear night and the full-ish moon we had a campfire! Lovely!

Phoenix was with a friend so it was just me & my little ladies and a neighbor girl chillaxing fireside for the evening. Turns out I had assembled the perfect panel of mallow & s'more expert evaluators. They are all reasonably informed about gelatin & candidly shrug it off in favor of the campfire crucial treat.

Regular marshmallows are chemy & gross but you can't make a s'more without them. Dandies are consciously produced & use organic ingredients so, while they are still just sugary treats, they could be one more board in the quiver of our anti-establishment efforts. I was hopeful.

I made a s'more tray of graham crackers, organic endangered species chocolate in milk chocolate with cherries and dark chocolate with blueberries and vegan and chem marshmallows so everyone could try combinations.

Dandy mallows are small so I lined up a few on my skewer to make a vegan s'more.

The vegan marshmallow out of the bag tasted all right but not really like a regular marshmallow. It was more vanilla flavored and a little bit like whipped taffy or something (which it probably prettymuch is). Toasted over the fire it puffed, softened & browned nicely.

Check out the close up by fire moonlight of my first ever vegan s'more!

The kids agreed that the vegan mallows were good in addition to conventional ones but not as complete replacements.

I liked the results enough that I plan to try them again for crispy rice treats. The kids are asking to try them in hot cocoa so we will probably enjoy some vegan hot cocoa on some splendid Sunday morning. Assuming the continued availability of Dandies I will probably do an 80/20 thing where we use vegan most of the time and chem at random campfires.

Funny how having 3 school age kids makes household marshmallow consumption high enough to raise bloggable considerations ;)

Bon vivant!