Christmas marzipan Norwegian style

22nd December 




This is my IG post from today,
feeling a bit under the weather :(

Almonds feature heavily in the Norwegian kitchen and never more so than at Christmas time.  Every year we make our own marzipan and those of you regular to this blog will know we have to make them in fruit shapes, it's a family tradition.

This year I chose to use natural food dyes and I must admit to being a little disappointed.  The colours were obviously not as bright as artificial colourings but the difference was staggering, especially with the red dye.  In fact we were so unimpressed that we ended up adding far too much of the colour that it altered the taste of the marzipan.  We ended up having to throw that section away, what a waste!  On closer inspection of the bottle the red food dye was made up from paprika and yes, we could taste that on our marzipan.  I love a bit of spice in my food, but this was not a good combo.  So our red apples are muted in colour this year and we did not even bother with making strawberries and very sad we are too.  It was therefore doubly sad when the yellow and dulled red colours did not mix to produce a wonderful orange colour, so we have no oranges this year either.  That 'orange' colour looked very much like some un mentionable dog mess and so too went the way of the bin.  Oh dear...






Not very red marzipan

The red natural food dye up against my red vase

...but we do have marzipan so not all is lost, just a lesson learnt.

Marzipan

To make the marzipan, I usually grind my own almonds but only after I have blanched them.  You can speed this process up in a number of ways 1) buy ground almonds, although I do not think for some reason this is quite the same, must be the Scandi snob in me, it does produce perfectly good results, so ignore my comments! 2) buy blanched almonds 3) buy ready made marzipan ;)

I tend to use 500g almonds and 500g icing sugar.  Mix the ground almonds and icing sugar well and then slowly add egg white.  Depending on the size of egg you will need 1-2 egg whites.  You want the mixture to come together and form a ball but not be sticky.  Remember if adding food dye, that too will add to the wetness of the dough.

Once the marzipan is made we divide it into the number of colours we wish to use and also leave some plain in colour. 

Make various shaped fruits and also you can cut some shapes out with the smallest cookie cutters you have  too.  Melted chocolate and marzipan are a good combination and often we do this too.

Chocolate covered marzipan

Here are this years contribution to our Christmas table...

We always make the marzipan and
then divide it up into sections for different colour dyes

Marzipan being shaped into fruit

The first plate of marzipan is ready

♥  We are now in Christmas week, hope all is going according to plan for you, as long as this cold that is threatening to set in disappears, all will be well this end, I hope?!  ♥