Marshmallows - Lessons Learned

1. You cannot use your grandmother's electric hand mixer to make marshmallows. It is likely to smoke, and you won't get enough air into your marshmallows. As my wife said, "Maybe it'll help if you put it on a higher speed," to which I said, "It's already on the highest speed." The only impact of this was that they didn't fluff up too much.
2. You can add food coloring during the mixing phase, no trouble. Make sure to add one drop of coloring at a time.
   
3. Unflavored gelatin smells. Bad. Don't attempt to overcompensate by adding 50% more vanilla. It leaves your marshmallows with a mild alcohol smell.
4. After you've cut the marshmallows up, be sure to keep them from drying out. You can do this by putting a piece of bread in the airtight container, which will feed moisture to your confectionary goodies.
5. When you give people the marshmallows, make sure to say that they're "Home-made." Otherwise they might think that you smooshed store-bought marshmallows into a pan and painted them pink. Save me from the humiliation!
6. If you want to make breakfast cereal style marshmallows, I bet you could do it by letting the marshmallows dry out and then cut them into little pieces. I suspect it would also be good to limit the amount of air you mix into the batter, not unlike my debacle. Note: blue diamonds and purple horseshoes are your own problem.