I made marshmallows yesterday, which resulted in some drama that I wrote about earlier (in short: my husband accidentally knocked the pan on the floor, I briefly debated being mad and then changed my mind when I saw my husband’s stricken face. The end.). But wait! There was MORE marshmallow-related drama to come….
I made a second batch of marshmallows which did not turn out as obligingly fantastic as the first lost batch, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles and so on. I carefully scraped the mixer bowl into two small pans (the larger one having been broken in the morning’s accident), and then elbowed one of the glass pans onto the floor, where it shattered. I stood there unblinking for a moment, and then sighed and swept up the INCREDIBLY STICKY MESS. Did I mention that it was INCREDIBLY STICKY? It was. It was a big white gooey broken shards of glass mess but I managed to only cut myself once, so hooray for me.
The other pan of marshmallows turned out just fine.
The Girl and I went out to a Christmas concert in the evening and I had my frequent poignant realization that away from her siblings, she is a little child still and then after the concert, we crowded into the small church basement along with what felt like 500 other people and The Girl ate a piece of sheet cake with thick bakery icing and drank a cup of tea with maybe three packages of sugar in it.
My mother noticed that I was abstaining from the lavish dessert table, which is – do I even need to write this? – unusual for me. I merely shuddered. Apparently, all of the morning’s marshmallow mangling had put me off sugar for once in my life. It was a lovely time, even with my new plans to live off carrot sticks and whole grains from that point on – a plan which I have since abandoned, you will be happy to read. And then later on, The Girl and I delivered bags of Nanaimo Bars and homemade marshmallows to a few friend’s houses before bedtime. It was a charming end to the day, and some very nice time spent with my sweet daughter. As I closed my eyes in bed I had the consoling thought that I was done dealing with marshmallows and their sticky awfulness for another year.
Oh, wrong. So very very wrong.
Did you know that it’s quite easy to miss small shards of glass on your floor when TWO PANS break in your kitchen? Public service announcement: it really, really is. I’d perfunctorily vacuumed the kitchen after breaking the second pan but now I want go back in time and kick my butt. My little guy was getting ready for school and hopping into his socks in the kitchen when he managed to locate a shard of glass with his foot and slice the bottom of his foot open.
OH THE GUILT.
I thought he needed stitches for the first while – there was SO MUCH BLOOD – but it was actually just a tiny little wound. The poor boy was pretty sad, though, so I kept him home from school for an hour just to make sure that he was all right and we read a stack of Christmas books and wrapped Christmas presents and basically he had the kind of hyper-focused attention I give my kids when I feel bad about something and he enjoyed himself SO much that when my dad showed up to take him to school, he cried AGAIN. So that was just a grand morning. (The Boy is fine – there was no glass in his cut, and the cut was actually pretty small. BY the time my dad got here, The Boy was entertaining himself by standing on chairs and jumping down, so I don’t think it was all THAT sore.)
In conclusion: I still recommend making marshmallows. They are easy AND impressive, so long as you can avoid injuring your children, breaking your dishes or getting divorced in the process.