Marzipan

One of the things about Christmas and New Year celebrations I love about German traditions are the use of marzipan, sweetened almond paste. Marzipan is used in the form of chocolates, stollen with marzipan in the center, and made into decorative edible candies on cakes and as festive hostess gifts. Marzipan is one of those foods that are enormously ancient in terms of traditions, and enormously fun. I suspect most of those of us in North America who cook with marzipan, or almond paste, buy it in tubes at specialty food stores. In the middle ages, marzipan was wildly popular not only on its own merits as a sweet, but as a decorative item added to cakes, and as intrinsic parts of "subtleties"; elaborate food constructions that were models of other objects, meant to the center pieces at huge formal banquets. Marzipan was easily made, easily shaped, and easily colored, making it an ideal material for three dimensional creation. It's more than likely that marzipan (or marchpane in early English) was one of the recipes brought to Europe by soldiers returning from the crusades; it seems to be a traditional delicacy, often made with honey, and served in the harem.

To this day, Luebeck, Germany is widely celebrated for their marzipan. It is made from the traditional ingredients; blanched and finely ground almonds, confectioner's sugar, eggs, and rose water. In broad terms, there are two sorts of marzipan, that sold as "almond paste," intended to be used in things that are themselves baked, like the marzipan at the heart of German Stollen. The other sort is ready-to-eat marzipan, most often used as candy in the shape of brightly colored fruits, or dipped in chocolate or used as the center of a marzipan truffle. You can buy your own very traditional marzipan chocolates from Nidederegger's the German confectioner.

For all that, it's actually pretty easy to make your own marzipan, and quite a lot of fun. You'll need fine ground almonds, or almond meal made from blanched almonds. Blanching almonds allows you to easily removed the skin. There are a lot of recipes for marzipan that essentially use raw egg whites; I don't recommend this procedure, since I'd just as soon not even risk salmonella. Here's a basic cooked version of marzipan. Here's another; both of these will fare better if you use a candy thermometer. Once you have your own marzipan, you can make decorative edible marzipan carrots, or marzipan roses for a cake, or roll small balls of marzipan and dip them in chocolate.