'We cater for billionaires': Meet the sisters giving marshmallows a gourmet twist
From Portobello to Portofino, Oonagh Simms has travelled a long way since she started selling marshmallows from a Saturday stall in west London. She was a newly qualified pastry chef, trying to earn extra cash, when she founded The Marshmallowist at Portobello Road Market in Notting Hill.
Twelve years later, she was flying to the Italian Riviera to toast gourmet marshmallows for A-listers celebrating the world’s most expensive wedding.
“We had front-row seats for Andrea Bocelli,” says Oonagh, remembering the pinch-me moments she shared with her big sister and business partner Jenny Simms at last June’s Portofino pre-wedding party for the son of India’s richest man. “We toasted hundreds of marshmallows on top of tiny fine china cups of hot chocolate; they were such a hit we ran out of cups.”
Months later, they were in Cannes, charming revellers at a starry pre-nuptial beach bash with miniature versions of their mallow-filled teacakes. “We do three or four weddings a year – mostly for billionaires,” says Jenny. “We always come back with a great story.”
When they’re not being flown around the world by wedding planners to the super-rich, Oonagh and Jenny work in the slightly less glamorous setting of a converted textile mill in Farsley, West Yorkshire. Here, at The Marshmallowist bakery, their ten-strong team crafts pillowy marshmallows and bauble-like teacakes for stockists including Fortnum & Mason and Daylesford.
“Our marshmallows carry flavour well because they don’t contain egg whites or fat,” Oonagh explains. “In a chocolate, for example, the cocoa butter coats your tongue and affects your tastebuds, but with a marshmallow you get a pure, beautiful hit of fruit, spices or alcohol.”
If you have memories of gluey marshmallows melting into oblivion over campfires, the delicate cubes of soufflé-like squishiness that Oonagh, Jenny and their skilled pastry chefs make by hand are a revelation. The bestselling raspberry and pink champagne marshmallow, for example, is made with whole fruit purée mixed with granulated sugar, glucose syrup, invert sugar and rosé champagne.
Boiled to a precise temperature, at which point fish gelatine is added, the gloop is poured into a large mixer and whipped with a giant balloon whisk until it increases tenfold. It’s always a “wow” moment, Jenny says, “when you turn round and see this huge mound of marshmallow fluff creeping up the bowl and threatening to spill over”.
It takes a few hands to lift the bowl and pour the wobbling mass into rectangular trays, which get levelled off with a palette knife and sprinkled with freeze-dried Scottish raspberries. Once cooled and set, each tray is hand-cut into 82 cubes using a grid-shaped “guitar string” cutter. Then the delicate work begins.
“We have to fight the urge to use our fingers because we don’t want fingerprints or blemishes on the mallows,” Oonagh explains. She demonstrates how she uses the fleshy heels of her gloved hands to tenderly roll each sticky cube in a “confectioner’s mix” of cornflour and icing sugar. “They’re made to look beautiful on cake stands and counters,” she says. “Each one is a single perfect piece of confectionery.”
Oonagh learned her craft in Paris, having fallen in love with French sweet shops during childhood camping holidays in the south of France with her teacher parents. She left Leeds for the French capital after A-levels, training for four years to become a chocolatier and patissier.
On her return to the UK, she worked for a London chocolate maker, running her Portobello Road market stall on Saturdays to help make ends meet. “I couldn’t have been in a better place,” says Oonagh, who mashed up classical French techniques with inventive flavour combinations inspired by Notting Hill’s restaurant and cocktail scene – and soon caught the eye of a buyer from Harvey Nichols.
As The Marshmallowist started growing, Jenny lent a hand, eventually leaving behind her career in political communications to become the company’s co-owner and co-director. “We’re very good at being brutally honest with one another,” says Jenny of their professional relationship. “But we get over it very quickly.”
As 2025 begins, The Marshmallowist is on the cusp of household-name status. It has just debuted in 75 Marks & Spencer foodhalls and they’re making 150,000 mallows a month for Knoops, a burgeoning chain of chic hot-chocolate cafés. Moving back to their native West Yorkshire has supercharged their growth, not just in terms of floor space – they’re extending the bakery – but also headspace.
“We go hiking with our families every weekend,” says Jenny, who lives at the foot of Burley Moor with her husband and two daughters. “The wildness helps me switch off.”
While Jenny packs hot chocolate and toasted coconut marshmallows for her girls, aged five and seven, Oonagh toasts passionfruit and ginger marshmallows over the firepit at home in Baildon after stomping over the gritstone moors with her husband, dog and two-year-old son: “I hold them at the edge of the flame and let them caramelise, like a crème brûlée. It brings the fruit and spice notes to life.”
She wouldn’t let a flame near the glossy shell of one of her mallow-filled teacakes, though. Devised for Fortnum & Mason, who asked Oonagh and Jenny to recreate the dainty confection that appeared on its first afternoon tea menu in 1926, The Marshmallowist’s teacake has evolved into an edible work of art, reinvented in ever more elaborate designs and flavours for every festival from Valentine’s Day to Halloween. In their jewel-like chocolate cases, hand-painted with colourful cocoa butters, the teacakes look (almost) too pretty to eat. No wonder Jenny recoils at the idea of going in face-first. “They should be served on a plate, with a knife, as a dessert,” she says. “Preferably with a glass of champagne.”
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