I’m sorta writing this piece backwards, aren’t I? It’s been crazy the last 30 days, I hope you don’t mind.
To remind you, here’s the finished product. The pastry cream used to fill part of it is here and the original recipe came from here (Elaine’s blog).
The sponge cake from Elaine’s recipe.
Working the marzipan.
The disaster before the success.
Anyway, I’m doing a third post because I haven’t told you about that marzipan. This wasn’t the first time I was working with marzipan, but I now realize that this was the first time I was working on it BY ITSELF. In other words, I mostly used marzipan before together with other ingredients, i.e., mixed with egg and other things to make cookies, or little almond cakes, etc.
I don’t know if the marzipan I had bought was old stock — I think it’s fairly safe to say that it’s not, because this is a store with a huge turnover rate and thousands of people walk through the door everyday, and the baking aisle, at least as far as I know, is replenished almost daily. So if I’m wrong about it, let me know. But I did discover that working with just your hands and marzipan? Is one of the most difficult things a baker can do. My palms were red from working it — we spent a good 30-45 minutes just getting it to the right color and evenness throughout.
As you can see I started out with a little ball of green — that by itself took me about 10 minutes to get the green evenly. And then the next 20 minutes, I had *THREE* KIDS helping me out with getting that green into the rest of the stuff. WHY do you have to make a little ball of color? So that you can control more carefully how that green goes into the rest of the marzipan. If you took the whole marzipan piece and added green, there would be no way to know if you overdid it until it was too late. As it happened in this case, we did use up the whole green ball and it turned out the perfect shade of green we wanted. The coloring in the picture makes it look a bit more yellow than it actually was, probably the lighting, but it was actually a nice shade of very-slightly-bluish green (I had added a half a drop or so of blue). Of course, there’s no hard and fast rule on exactly what kind of green it should be, and I’ve seen it in bakeries and on the ‘net ranging from yellow green to apple green to almost a kelly green.
I usually get my colors from SugarCraft whom I’ve talked about before. Another great source I’ve been hearing about, though I haven’t used theirs, is Cake Craft, but what I’d really like to stock up on for this year’s baking adventures is Nature’s Flavors natural food coloring! I don’t use much, but I do always keep on hand at least a blue, yellow and red — primary colors, of course, which you can then play with to get the desired shade. The thing to remember about food coloring is to use it very carefully — sweet and slow does the trick. You can always add more coloring if you need to, but dialing it back to a lighter shade (unless you’ve got more material) is more difficult.
Re the disaster — you can read more about what happened in the pastry cream post.