Every year, people buy boxes of those sugary marshmallow candies and probably eat some of them, discarding the rest: but why not use them in delicious recipes? We decided to look into how you can cook with Peeps.

Each Peep weights about 0.25 oz (7 g) and has about 6.5 g of sugar in it, but the Peeps company thinks that a serving size is 4 Peeps. Wishful thinking perhaps? Peeps are made from marshmallow, corn syrup, sugar and carnauba wax, and in addition to the original yellow color, now are available in a number of other bright colors including pink, green and blue.

If you’ve had Peeps in your Easter basket for many years (even if you never ate them) you may remember that they used to be made by the Rodda Candy Company. It turns out that Rodda was acquired in 1953 by Just Born, a candy company in Bethlehem, PA owned, not surprisingly, by Sam Born. It was under Born’s management that the mass production of Peeps grew

Since they are so pervasive in the US and Canada we decided to see what else we could do with them.

One of our first experiments was to put some Peeps in our popcorn. You may not know this, but you can buy a jar of ordinary popcorn and put some in a paper bag and pop it in the microwave without any special packaging or seasonings. We found that about 1/3 cup of kernels is pretty much equivalent to what you pop in a large bag of microwave popcorn.

So to use up a few Peeps, we cut one up and put it a bag with the 1/3 cup of popcorn and popped it using the usual microwave popcorn settings. The result was sweetish popcorn, rather like kettle corn.

In our second try, we cut up two Peeps and popped them with the 1/3 cup of popcorn. The result was sweetish popcorn with a caramel coating and was really pretty good.

When you pop corn with 3 Peeps, Peep-fatigue sets in and the marshmallow actually inhibits the popping. Stick with two and you’ll have a nice sweet snack.

• Recipes