Christmas Cake – The Marzipan Stage
It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas… Well, it’s not actually as Morgan is still ill as am I and we still have loads to do and another full week of work and school next week yet.
Even so, I found time to work on the next stage of the Cole Christmas Cake today, namely covering it in a thick layer of my favourite of confections, marzipan. Whilst making the cake a couple of weeks ago I actually ended up making three separate cakes. Two smaller rectangular ones in loaf tins and at the large round Christmas cake. I therefore had a chance to practise my marzipan rolling technique on one of the smaller cakes first today. It was a rectangular cake not a round one but all went well, although I think I was a little economical with the marzipan so made sure that I had loads more than was necessary for the round one.
Cake
I covered both cakes with a thin layer of smooth apricot jam first to help the marzipan stick. Then I rolled out the marzipan to size and simply draped it over the cakes before gently smoothing it down around the edges. I was expecting to get into a mess with the round one and end up with a wrinkled covering with various pleats and folds. However, it all went surprisingly well and our Christmas Cake now has a nice thick layer of super smooth marzipan on it. There are still a few little lumps and bumps where there are bigger pieces of fruit and nut in the cake itself, but the next stage of the process will hide those. I shall now leave it to dry out for a week before covering it with a similar layer of royal icing. Once that is on I shall go to town decorating the cake ready for the Christmas table. I’ve bought some star-shaped cutters and silver balls just for the job and have a design all planned out.
The rectangular cake that I’ve now covered with marzipan will have a further covering of chocolate frosting before being ready for consumption.
As for the third cake, well I decided not to cover it with anything and instead eat it naked. Yes, I mean the cake will be naked, not me! That means that it was ready for consumption as it is, and you know what that means… yep, I’ve started consuming it already, and very nice it is too!
