Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Sno Balls

Ooh.

How many of these do I need finished,

do you think, to be like I did it?

How about five?

Don't only like two come in a package?

I like the [laughs].

I like the way you think.

[upbeat music]

Ah!

[Both] Ohhhhhh!

Hi everyone.

I'm Claire.

I'm back in the BA Test Kitchen

and today we are making gourmet Sno-balls.

[upbeat jazzy music]

We took a little break, but we're back.

I've actually never had this really classic

Hostess snack, a Sno Ball, but I'm excited to try it.

Our goal today is to recreate the pink version.

These are coconut and marshmallow covered

chocolate cake with creamy filling.

Okay, I don't want to be overly confident,

but I think, I think we got this.

It has this really, kind of bouncy, marshmallow coating.

It has a thin layer of very small, dried coconut.

And then when you turn it over,

you can see that the marshmallow coating

doesn't go all the way around.

The entire thing is three and 1/8 inches in diameter total.

It has sort of a flat top.

So this is just the marshmallow coating.

So it is like this cloak, sort of,

that goes over top of the cake.

I think it's a little dry, doesn't taste like chocolate.

The cream filling I basically think

is the same as the marshmallow on the outside

but with less gelatin so it's less set.

It's a little bit more, like, spreadable.

[Brad] Sno-balls! The name, yeah, Sno-balls.

[Brad] If there was ever something that I think

you would like be able to nail--

Yeah. Pretty,

I don't wanna say easy,

go jinxing you-- I know, I know.

But like you do this [beep] for fun.

Yeah.

There's something really fun about, like,

the bounce to the marshmallow.

Oh, it's delightful.

I can't believe you like this.

Every time I think I know you, you really surprise me.

The cake is also kinda dry, right?

Like it's a dry, the chocolate part's dry.

Yeah, but I kinda like that.

Okay.

The cream, too, in the middle is like almost nothing.

It doesn't--

Right, right.

It just tastes like pure sugar.

[Claire] The cake has like no chocolate flavor, really.

It has a real drying quality.

Actually has really nice coconut flavor.

Yeah. But it is so dry.

It's dry, right?

Brad was like I like it that it's dry.

I was like no one likes dry cake.

Nobody likes dry cake so that's just not a thing.

Right.

It really does fit almost exactly

into the bottom of like a standard muffin tin.

So I think I'm gonna use that devil's food cake recipe

for the chocolate cupcakes I did.

Alright.

Okay, stay tuned.

Time for my favorite part of every episode,

where I read the ingredients.

And it is a long list.

Hey, this is the longest word we've ever seen.

[laughs] all one word,

[sigh] That was a mouthful.

Ooh, wait a minute, how Hostess Sno-balls are made

from Unwrapped Food Network.

I think we should watch this, no?

[upbeat music]

Ooh, look at how it's done!

Fascinating!

So the cakes are on the conveyor belt

and the marshmallow is extruded in a sheet

that really covers the cupcakes like a blanket.

So that's a good, that's an interesting tip.

I'm gonna think about this in its elemental parts.

So first we'll do the cake.

And I'm gonna use this devil's food cake recipe

that I developed a couple years ago.

We'll bake it in the muffin tins.

Then there's the marshmallow.

I'm gonna use the same base recipe

for the outside and the cream filling,

but I think the cream filling will just

have less gelatin so it won't be as firm.

Then the third element is the coconut.

And I think what I'll do is dehydrate the coconut

overnight and then have some fun with making

a natural food coloring out of beets.

[upbeat jazzy music]

I'm gonna print out the devil's food cake recipe

and start there.

First I'm gonna bloom my cocoa in espresso

and hot water.

And then I'm gonna put it together

with a method called reverse creaming.

So you start with all your dry ingredients,

plus a portion of the fat and liquid

already in the bowl.

It just produces a more level cake.

Then divide into my pan and bake.

Give it a little tap.

God damn it.

Alright, so these stuck.

Not super successful.

Next time I'll try to do a more

substantial layer of butter and

then a really nice, generous flour coating.

This is the Hostess version.

Our version.

But overall I think it's a really nice size

and looks really, really close to the original.

Great texture, it's like super tender.

It feels like, very moist.

Great chocolate flavor.

I think I'm gonna decrease the leavening

a little bit, because to try to get it

to settle down a little.

Right.

I'll do another batch.

I also wanna work on my coconut mixture,

because I need the coconut before I can

put the marshmallow outside together.

So I'm gonna be careful

about un-molding them this time.

But there we go, I think they look great.

Nice, flat bottom slash top.

Good chocolate flavor.

So I'll let these cool, we'll wrap them up

and save them tomorrow when we come back.

Time to open up these coconuts.

Just really whack the hell out of it.

Alright well this one's pretty rotten.

This is the problem Oh no!

with whole coconuts, especially like in the northeast.

They're usually pretty rotten. Oh.

Wait, hold on.

Hold on, hold on.

You have coconuts?

[Chris mumbling]

Oh my God, Chris!

Alright, okay just take two.

Ooh, okay that's a pretty nice looking coconut.

I don't really know-- I don't even know--

What it is. This is like,

the coconut tool.

Boom! Oh, okay.

Boom! Okay great.

I see, I see. You know,

you have to be quite vigorous about it.

Oh there we go. But there you go, you know?

Like-- Okay great.

Alright well we'll be here for a few minutes.

So you're rolling.

Perfect, put these in the dehydrator.

In the meantime, I wanna get my food dye going.

So here I have these nice, little beets.

I'm gonna just peel them and puree them,

strain it, reduce the liquid,

and that's gonna be our food coloring.

The cakes are at a good place,

the coconut is dehydrating.

With the food coloring, I have

to figure out how to dilute it.

I was thinking maybe using vodka

or something that's not water-based,

because I don't wanna add moisture

back to the coconut after I've dehydrated it.

But I think, overall, a pretty good day one.

[upbeat jazzy music]

Oh that is dry.

I kinda want to look at it next to, what are these called?

Sno-balls, again?

Oh I get it, snow coconut.

It's like snow.

Think about it.

So I think that this size of the pieces

actually looks really really close.

It doesn't taste super coconut-y.

Before I attempt the marshmallow coating

would be to work on the filling.

I'm trying to think back with Twinkies,

what we did with the filling and I think

for that we ended up with a buttercream?

I'm gonna use a Swiss meringue buttercream.

It's looking really good and I feel like

I'm getting a lot in there.

Oh my God.

No filling.

Let me look at this again.

So this is marshmallow.

It's just so not, delicious.

Italian meringue buttercream which has

a cooked sugar syrup poured into the egg whites,

is very stable at room temperature

so maybe that's the best way to go.

[mixers whirring]

[laughs]

Are we there, Kevin?

It's really good.

Obviously the homemade version is a lot yellower

because we added butter.

Maybe I want to move now to the coconut

and try to start getting that color right.

Were we talking about this?

Sharp objects?

Yeah, it's really good.

[mumbling]

Yeah.

Gillian Flynn, she wrote Gone Girl, she wrote the novel.

Anyway, sorry, lost focus.

The last time I used this machine,

the only time I used it, was...

[Narrator] Taste the rainbow

Skittles [laughs].

So this is that food coloring that we made.

You're bringing out the airgun.

Yeah the compressor.

I wasn't here the day you got to use it.

Plugged in, we air it up.

Where's the gauge?

How do you set the PSI, right here?

What does that mean?

Okay, so that screws on.

Yeah it does.

So now it's not spraying anything.

Oh, do you think it's clogged?

That there's--

Could be, did you clean it the last time?

No.

Did you filter this, Claire?

I did it through cheesecloth.

Maybe it needs to be finer.

Okay so let me get more,

let me get several layers of cheesecloth then.

Or even, I know you're not gonna wanna hear this

for the sake of time but--

Coffee filter?

Coffee filter.

Yeah, okay.

Now we're gonna clean this thing.

Chunks in there? We can't have chunks in your spray gun.

Everybody knows that.

You know, just as important as purchasing tools,

is maintaining.

Let this all be a lesson learned.

I'm not mad.

Just a little disappointed.

[Claire] Are you talking about me?

No.

This is to get out, I mean look,

I really kind of screwed it up because

there's all these little sediment or sort of beet solids.

Alright Brad, it's filtering.

Should I be mixing it with like, alcohol

or something that's not water that won't hydrate the--

Can this thing run alcohol?

Probably.

Yeah probably.

It's liquid.

Wouldn't it be fun if we did, like, Malibu?

Oh, a little coconut in there?

Ooh Claire, that's not a bad idea.

[upbeat jazzy music]

Not bad!

Let's try it with the coconut.

Ooh it does smell like coconut, wow.

This is the best thing we've ever done.

Well, that worked amazingly well.

That was a lot of fun.

Thanks for your help.

It's time to fill the cakes.

So there's about a scant teaspoon of the cream.

Let me weigh about a teaspoon of this filling.

Five grams.

I'm gonna try and fill it

and hopefully get five to seven grams.

The cake itself started to crack.

I think maybe a better idea would to actually,

physically create a little bit of a space for the cream.

So, I'm gonna use this apple corer.

[upbeat music]

This is better.

Looking pretty good Claire! Not bad, right?

I'm a little concerned with the color.

This is like, brilliant, dental, white.

[Claire] I know, I know.

This has butter in it so it's yellow.

Nobody said it had to be the same color.

Oh Claire, piped butter into the middle of the Sno cake.

[Claire] It's not only butter.

[laughs]

Absolutely delicious.

It's got great flavor.

Good.

[sighs] I don't feel terribly beaten down because

everything has pretty much worked the way I wanted it to.

So that's great.

I do think that in some ways the hardest part is gonna be

the last part which is trying to figure out a way

to enrobe the cakes with the marshmallow.

My idea is basically to type circles of

the marshmallow over top of the coconut

and then invert it overtop of the cakes.

This does more or less fit the cake that we've made.

This one is really more like ten centimeters

and it's maybe stretched out a little bit

so I'm gonna shoot for nine.

So I have a marshmallow recipe that I've used before

that's from David Lebovitz that uses egg whites

but also some light corn syrup,

not high fructose, and gelatin.

[upbeat jazzy music]

And then I want to use just the back of the spoon

and try to spread it into one even layer.

This is not really working.

Eee! I'm gonna try again.

Okay, that maybe worked.

Let me go ahead and do the other ones.

[upbeat drumming]

God damn it.

No, I didn't really center it.

Eee!

[laughs] You guys, this is outta hand.

Ah!

Oh! I missed the wrapping, Claire.

That's a freaking Sno-ball if I ever seen one!

Thanks, I think I'm gonna give them another coating of--

You think you need to spray it again--

Of coconut. Yeah I agree.

Alright, we got the proper balance.

[Claire] But it has to--

Set more?

[Claire] Yeah they'll set even more.

I'm gonna try one more thing [sighs].

The problem is that the marshmallow

is really set pretty firmly.

Just as a hail Mary with the marshmallow I have left,

I piped everything out overtop of a layer of coconut

into this kind of rectangle and so I'm gonna try

to basically just punch out these circles and see

if I can cover the last few remaining pieces of cake.

Oh no.

Oh, this is sticky, god.

[laughs] They're ribbed.

You know, at least we used up the rest of the marshmallow

and the rest of the coconut, so that's okay with me.

We're in a good place, we're really close.

I'm gonna throw some plastic on these,

let them set overnight at room temp so that tomorrow,

hopefully we get that same kind of bounce on the marshmallow

and then Brad and I will hit them with the airbrush again

and then we'll be ready to taste.

It's day three, I feel like we're basically done.

Maybe give them another coat of that food coloring.

So, there's that cream center that we piped in yesterday.

I'm happy to see that it did not absorb into the cake

which is something that happened when we

were working on the Twinkies episode.

Oh my god, the cream, like, disappeared.

It's gone. No.

It's really good.

I think this is one of

the best tasting ones of the whole series.

You know what I liked about it?

It's a little bit salty from the butter cream on the inside.

But I think we need a little more just uniform pink color

around the sides to get the overall effect.

I'm gonna play around with the airbrush gun cuz

Brad kinda hogged it yesterday, so.

Oh, yeah.

The hue is actually even closer than I thought it would be.

So, I think that improved the color a lot.

I think its neat that we achieved

that sort of unnatural looking color

but with totally natural ingredients

and no artificial food coloring.

Right amount of marshmallow.

Yeah?

That's quite nice.

The cake is moist.

And the--

It's got great flavor though.

I'm happy that the filling is nice

and centered inside the cake.

It's nice, you did a great job.

Thank you.

Great job, Claire.

Great job everyone.

Thanks Brad.

Ooh.

Here so you can see.

I just love that you got a cake

that actually tastes like chocolate.

Mmhm, it has a lot of cocoa in it.

I only have to dock you for one thing.

[laughs]

I feel like the coconut flavor I know

could be played up a little bit more.

Yeah, I agree with you.

The cake is so good.

Yay.

It's just, like perfectly moist.

They look so good!

Thanks.

This is way more delicious.

Thanks, I would, it's like, all things I like,

chocolate cake, buttercream, marshmallow, coconut.

So, what could be bad?

You [beep] nailed this.

Oh, excuse me.

[laughs]

Alright so, I can't say that Sno-balls were

a nostalgic part of my childhood but I

had a lot of fun recreating them.

All the parts came together relatively easily

and I'm super pleased about that.

I also think of all of the treats in this series

that we've recreated this might be in most ways

the most delicious one.

Thanks for watching, so happy to back

and come back fro the next one.

Here's how you make a gourmet Sno-ball:

To make the coconut coating:

Open two coconuts and use a coconut grater

to finely shred the white flesh.

Spread out on baking sheet and dehydrate overnight.

Combine Malibu and reduced filtered beet juice

in the chamber of an airbrush and use to paint coconut pink.

Set aside.

To make the cake:

Whisk 1/2 cup cocoa with hot espresso then whisk in two eggs

and vanilla paste until smooth.

Whisk one cup cake flour, 1/2 cup granulated sugar,

1/2 cup light brown sugar, one teaspoon baking powder,

one teaspoon kosher salt, and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.

Add one stick butter, six tablespoons buttermilk,

and one tablespoon vegetable oil.

Beat on high until mixture is light and fluffy

then add cocoa mixture and beat until batter is silky

and smooth and divide batter among the cups of muffin pans

that have been thoroughly buttered and floured.

Bake in the 275 degree oven.

Invert cakes on baking racks and let cool completely.

Use an apple core to bore into center of cakes.

Set aside cakes.

For the filling:

Soften 1/2 teaspoon gelatin in one tablespoon cold water.

Combine 1/2 cup sugar and two tablespoons water

in a small saucepan.

Cook over medium, stirring until sugar is dissolved

then bring to a boil.

Meanwhile, beat three large egg white, a pinch of salt,

and a 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar in

the bowl of a stand mixer until frothy.

Sprinkle in two tablespoons sugar.

When the sugar mixture reaches 245 fahrenheit,

remove from heat and stir in softened gelatin.

Slowly stream gelatin mixture into egg whites

and beat in two sticks butter, then beat in a pinch more

of salt and one teaspoon of vanilla paste.

Transfer to a piping bag and pipe buttercream

into void inside each cake, then replace circle

of cake removed by apple corer to create a plug.

For the marshmallow:

Soften two packets granulated gelatin in 1/2 cup cold water.

Set aside.

Combine one cup sugar, 1/3 cup corn syrup,

and 1/3 cup water in a small sauce pan.

Cook over medium stirring until sugar is dissolved then

bring to a boil and set up a candy thermometer to the side.

Meanwhile beat four large egg whites

and a pinch of salt into stiff peaks.

When the sugar mixture reaches 245 fahrenheit,

slowly stream syrup into egg whites

and continue to beat on high.

Melt gelatin over low and stream into meringue.

Transfer into two large piping bags.

Place greased round cutter over parchment paper sprinkle

the inside with an even layer of coconut.

Then, pipe a quarter inch thick round of marshmallow

inside the circle.

Remove cutter, then use a thin metal spatula to invert

the circle of marshmallow overtop of the filled cake,

work down and around sides patting more coconut

into any bare spots.

Let set at least four hours or overnight, covered.

Whoa, that was a long one.

[Brad] Oh! Claire!

Yes, Brad?

It's a nut.

Well, its a coconut.

Well coconuts are the seeds of the coconut tree.

The seeds are in the apple.

The coconut is the seed, right?

Wait, someone's gotta fact check this.