Last weekend, I did what all normal people do when they are bored on a Sunday afternoon: make marshmallows from scratch! Please don’t ask me what possessed me to try this. I am not the biggest fan of store-bought marshmallows in the first place, but all it took was a few minutes of skimming Bon Appetit to find this recipe for rose water marshmallows. I was sold!

I love any dessert that includes rose water, but I ultimately decided to use up some of the bulk of vanilla beans that I bought at Beanilla.com (really, a website dedicated to vanilla beans exists!) for vanilla marshmallows. I omitted the rose water and used one scraped vanilla bean, plus a splash of vanilla extract. It was a fun process, but all along I remained skeptical that the meringue-like substance I poured into the pan would set up and be marshmallows. But alas, it did!

The end result was delicious, but nowhere near perfect. You have to coat the pan with baking spray and powdered sugar before you pour in the marshmallow, and I think I would wait until the mix has cooled off a little more before this step; the hot marshmallow melted the powdered sugar, which made it clumpy after it had cooled. I also made the brilliant mistake of trying to cover my pan with plastic wrap as it sat out on the counter. Of course the plastic collapsed onto the surface and stuck, ripping a large hole in the marshmallow at center of the pan when I attempted to pull it off. To top it all off, because I clearly can’t read, I prepared the marshmallow on a baking sheet instead of in a 13×9″ pan. This meant that I ended up with marshmallow strips instead of squares. My bad.

But, the silver lining to all of these mistakes is that the marshmallows were still edible and even tasty! We layered a few strips of marshmallow on top of a graham cracker and a square of dark chocolate, and then hit it quickly with the kitchen torch — the perfect s’more! That’s enough for me to call it a win.