Marzipan in Bloom

I first tried to make marzipan last month around St. Patrick's day. After some difficulty and several hours, I ended up with marzipan, managed to color it and ended up with some cute marzipan shamrocks. I had made such a huge batch of marzipan, that I tried freezing it (wrapped in both plastic wrap and foil). I was ready to try molding marzipan again and wanted to be a bit more creative. To go with the season, I wanted to make some marzipan tulips and had seen these in my new marzipan book. Easy, right? Well, since I already had the marzipan made, it wasn't too bad.

I read in another baking book on how you can reconstitute dried marzipan. And, while the marzipan froze quite well, it was a bit dry after it thawed. I used a little bit of corn syrup and kneaded it quite a bit until it was nice and moist and mailable. I started by coloring it the color I wanted my tulips to be and just went with a bright yellow. After the color was kneaded through, I started with a small tube shape.

The tube was cut with a sharp paring knife into equal pieces for each of the tulip flowers.

Then, you molded each piece into a nice smooth cone shape.

Then, I took a pair of sharp kitchen scissors to cut slits in the tip of the cone to make the petals. The book had the petals pointed in, but I molded mine out just a touch.

Here are all my tulips! Once I had accomplished this piece of it, I read on to see how I could do the leaves and stem to finish them off. I used another piece of marzipan to color green, made the cones again and only cut one larger slit to make two leaves.

For the stem, the book suggested using spaghetti noodles (a 3 inch section) to color with food coloring to match the stem. I thought this was ingenious, but was actually out of spaghetti, which I couldn't believe. So, I found some small lollipop sticks, cut them in half and colored them green with a pastry brush. It worked great!

I was so proud of my marzipan tulips and proudly displayed them on top of my spring tulip cupcakes (see next post). I have more marzipan in the freezer and fun plans for things to make coming up!