I've had this Food Friday concept for a while and have finally decided on the direction it will go this year. I am a lover of food and also photography, so the question was how do I blend them together to create a personal project that didn't become so large that it interfered with the normal workflows of the studio. As with any project, I established some ground rules for all future Food Friday projects:
1. Start to Finish time to prepare and cook food - 60 minutes or less
2. All food in photograph must be edible
3. It needs to look delicious
I know what you are thinking... I like to keep my rules to a minimum.
For my first project I wanted to try a dessert. I pulled out the Better Homes and Gardens Special Interest Publication and went with Cherry-Mallow Cookies. Prep time 30 minutes and no baking involved. And they looked yummy. It fit my rules, so I went for it.
What the recipe didn't tell you was that it was a sticky mess. I've never really cooked with marshmallow creme before, and I didn't realize how sticky it actually was. And the vanilla flavored candy coating at my local grocery store, never melted properly to be a smooth liquid worthy of dipping a cookie into. It was more like a glob of chocolate gunk. Because I have rule number two in place, next time I would probably go with a Ghirardelli white chocolate baking bar. You know what you get with Ghirardelli and it would have made a nice substitute. Or a second alternative would be Bakers Dipping Chocolate by Kraft.
The recipe was simple. Vanilla wafer sandwiches, inside filling was marshmallow creme with chopped maraschino cherries. Sandwich was then dipped into the white chocolate candy coating and a maraschino cherry was placed on top.
Start to finish time was probably about 45 minutes. Trying to figure out the candy coating resulted in a lot of wasted sandwiches that were dipped and just ugly with globs of chocolate on them. Then we had to make more marshmallow creme and cherry sandwich filling and start over. All in all, these were a nice little finger food. I do feel a bit of responsibility, and I must warn you of the extremely high sugar content in these little morsels. If you want to try these yourself, or just see the full recipe, take a look at Better Homes and Gardens
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