Courtney and the Mallows

The marshmallows will get shipped all over the place. Hawaii. Alaska. Central America. Mexico. “We haven’t done Europe yet,” says Courtney Taylor-Turner as she flips on the KitchenAid Pro 600 that sits on the kitchen island in her home in North Huntington. “Our most popular flavor used to be the toasted coconut, but not anymore. Now it’s peppermint. I wasn’t even sure how well it’d be received, but that one does really well.”

This is marshmallow season. The holidays. When Courtney will be in the kitchen, 14 hours a day, pretty much every day, whipping up sugary little cubes that are soft and puffy and will be hand packaged, by the dozen, into vertical Ziplock bags that are wrapped in tissue paper and placed into a navy box with gold embossing. “Smalls Gourmet Marshmallows” reads the label. “Life is short… eat the mallow!”

“I have such a sweet tooth. And I love marshmallows,” she says, adjusting the speed of the mixer as it whips the sugar, vanilla paste, gelatin, ice water and corn syrup into a puffy white cloud. “I used to love those Stay Puffs. I’d pop three a night. They’re fat free. Did you know that?”

She loved them so much that she figured she might as well start making her own marshmallows. The recipe came from The French Laundry. The first flavor she ever made was vanilla. “They didn’t turn out too well. Too stiff. It takes time. It’s all about the temperature boiling points. Each flavor has a different one,” she says, turning off the mixer and grabbing a long, plastic pan the size of a sheet cake. “Now I can whip them out easily. At first, I’d have a bite here and there. I ended up gaining 40 pounds. I was starting to look like a marshmallow. Now I just taste the batter occasionally, just to be sure everything is okay.”

She makes flavors like lemon chiffon, cookies and cream, cabernet, Kahlua and vanilla cream, espresso, cinnamon, salted caramel, snickerdoodle. There’s also a Mallow of the Month Club. “You can sign up for three, six, or 12-month memberships. If you do the 12, you get a free box on your birthday.”

“See those black flecks in the bottom?” she says as she empties the mixing bowl into the pan. “That’s the vanilla. I love it when people bite into a marshmallow and can actually see the vanilla beans.”

She picks up a rubber spatula, spreading the marshmallow. “You want to get it even,” she says, covering the pan with a lid before grabbing another pan from the kitchen table. “These are ready to be cut.”

The contraption she is going to cut them on is very large and crazy looking and is occupying a massive amount of space on the island. “It’s a guitar cutter,” she says. The guitar cutter has an aluminum base and two intimidating, stainless-steel frames outfitted with what look like dozens of guitar strings. “You put the marshmallows down on the base,” she says, maneuvering to one side, “then, fold one side down for the first cut, and fold the other side down for the second cut. That’s how you get those perfectly sized squares. I used to hand cut these with a pizza cutter. They were a nightmare to ship. Every box was a different weight.”

Courtney has bought marshmallows from every competitor she could find. She looked at their packaging. How long the marshmallows could sit there and still look and taste good. “I don’t use any preservatives in mine, so they last about four to six weeks.”

She doesn’t mind hanging out in the kitchen for 14 hours a day or dealing with all the customers from Hawaii, Alaska, Central America and Mexico who place orders on her website or through Amazon Prime.

“I don’t want to punch a clock,” she says. “I like being able to get my kids off to school and be home when they are sick. I mean, it’s fun making marshmallows. Who can be crabby when you’re making a mallow?”