Recipes

I have heard that store bought Marzipan doesn't taste as good as the homemade kind and I just can't afford storebought sugarpaste. So I'll be trying making them both. I will probably try the Marzipan this weekend and the sugarpaste soon (maybe next weekend?)

Marzipan

Ingredients
8 ounces (1/2 pound) almond paste
3 cups confectioners' sugar
1 teaspoon rose-blossom water, orange-blossom water, or pure vanilla extract
5 tablespoons light corn syrup (or glucose)

Directions
1. Break the almond paste into pieces and place in the bowl of a standing electric mixer. Begin mixing at low speed with a paddle attachment.
2. Add half the confectioners' sugar, and all the rose water and corn syrup. Mix at low speed until well incorporated.
3. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula and add the remaining confectioners' sugar.
4. Transfer the marzipan to a smooth work surface and knead until smooth, adding small amounts of confectioners' sugar if the dough is too sticky. Don't add too much.
5. Shape the marzipan into a smooth round ball and double-wrap in plastic wrap. Place in an airtight container. Marzipan will keep for up to four months in the refrigerator in an airtight container.

Sugar Paste
Ingredients
1 oz powdered gelatine
1/2 cup water
2 pounds sifted confectioners' sugar
2 tbsp glycerine
1/2 cup karo or light white corn syrup

Softon or bloom the gelatine in the water, then heat, but not to boiling point. Meanwhile warm the icing/confectioners' sugar in the oven at the lowest setting, then switch off (the sugar should be about body temerature). Add the glycerine and karo syrup to the warmed sugar. Combine both mixtrues together. A heavy-duty machine on low speed using the dough hook can initially mix this. If the motor begins to strain, tip out on the work surface, grease the hands with white vegetable shortening and finish manually. The mixture might look and feel a little lumpy but will smooth out during the kneading process.

Yesterday I went to ABC Sugar Art. It’s a very cool store that I could get into trouble with. They had a display set up that looked like embroidery done with icing. I asked at the counter and the lady said that they teach a class called “filet crochet” and those were samples. I looked on the website today and it looks like they don’t have it scheduled at the moment but I’m going to keep checking. It looked like something I would love to be able to do.

Pretty Cakes are expensive

I’m doing 2 cakes for Max and Jessie, one in August for Pennsic and one October. The Pennsic cake will be 4 half sheet cakes and the one in October will be 3 tiers. Jessie liked the “All that Glitters” cake in Kerry Vincent’s Romantic Wedding Cakes so that’s in the plans.
I’ve been having lots of fun going online and looking at all the junk I’m going to have to buy to pull off the cakes.
Here are some of the things I need to get for the cakes. I will post more as I find hem/have more time.
Hard Candy Mold $2.00
Super Gold Luster Dust $2.95 The lady at ABC Sugar Art said I should only need one container of this for the Pennsic cake but that she would recommend I get 2 to be safe.
Super Pearl Dust $2.95
PME Cutter-Crinoline Frill $14.25
I might get this one instead Jem F3, 3 Division Frill $4.04
Piping Gel $3.00
The October cake calls for Pearls which I might decide to put on the August cake as well. I can go with beadmakers which give me the advantage of being able to make them easily in the future:
4mm bead maker $17.40
6mm bead maker $18.70
I can go with pre-made pearls
4mm edible pearls 4oz. $6.99
1 6mm edible pearls 4 oz. (website says about 500) $6.99
Or I can try my hand at making pearls with Icing tips as described at Pearl Instructions
Things I’ve already gotten
PME Flower Blossom Plunger $25.49
1 Disc Cutter-86 mm $3.79
Other things I want to buy
Gum Paste Rose Bouquet Set $7.99
Gum Paste Orchid Bouquet Set $7.99
Gumpaste Modeling Tools $5.89
Comprehensive Cake Decorating book $9.95
International School of Sugarcraft-Beginners $19.95
Books I own and recommend as true cake porn (reviews to come)
Cakewalk: Adventures with Sugar by Margaret Braun, Quentin Bacon (Photographer)
ISBN: 0847823342; (September 2001)

Romantic Wedding Cakes by Kerry Vincent ISBN: 1853918598; (July 2001)

Research

Google.com searches (various combinations of) Reliquary, Triptych, religious, museum, art, metalwork, medieval, jewel, enamelwork, stavelot, byzantine, 13th century

The closest picture I can find is the Stavelot Reliquary
The general idea is to make a cake that is 3 pieces. The side pieces will be half sheet cake sized and the middle piece will be the size of a sheet cake. It will be a honey-saffron cake covered with marzipan. The marzipan will be coated in luster gold dust (super gold) and covered with Almond flavor hard candy jewels. The enamel pieces have caused me some trouble figuring out what I want to do. I started out thinking they should be color flow, but now I’m thinking that I want to make sugerplate circles, pipe the outlines in royal icing, coat the whole thing in luster dust and then fill in the enamel sections with colored piping gel.

When I went over to see Max and Jessie we talked about what the cake should look like. Each wedding should have about 100 people at it and the cake recipe is one that Max is developing for Honey-Saffron cake. I had been thinking about the cake and hit upon the idea of covering it in Marzipan. We very quickly decided that transporting a tiered cake for 100 5 hours to a camping event then storing it for a day or two was just not going to happen. So instead the cake is going to be 4 half sheet cakes.

Max had said that he really did not care very much what the cake looked like so I was fairly free to design whatever I wanted. Okay...let's see...well, we could cover the cake in flowers. But that really wouldn't make the cake personal to them. Then I asked what their arms looked like. Jessie ran upstairs and came back with two wooden shields with their arms on them. To be truthful, now I don't remember what they looked like but that night I hit upon the idea of taking the main charges from their arms and creating one cake with her arms, one with his, and then a full sheet cake sized one mingling the two. Cool, but a lot of piping (bad idea) and still it didn't sing to anyone.

Max suggested that I start thinking along the lines of reliquaries. So we started pulling books down from their amazing library and flipping through them. Neil found this absolutly beautiful triptych which everyone immediately loved. That really sparked the creative juices and we decided that the cake should be designed to look like a large triptych. Gold, jewels, enameling and everything.

Of course, at that point it was 11 pm and I went home satisfied. Idiot that I am, it didn't occur to me until the next day that I had written down nothing about the piece that inspired us. Not the name of the book, the name of the triptych, where it was located or anything. I have long believed that if you look long enough on the internet you can find almost anything. The problem is you need at least a little bit of information to search with.

This is the story of a wedding cake...or rather two wedding cakes. My good friends Neil and Tirzah have friends getting married this year. Max is Neil's Armoring Laurel (what the heck am I talking about? www.sca.org). When they were talking about the wedding Tirzah suggested me for making the cake.

So I eventually went over to see Max and Jessie to talk about the cake. It turns out that there are two weddings going to be taking place this year. The legal one will take place at the greatest camping event of the year, Pennsic (www.pennsicwar.org). The other one will take place in October and be a 1890's English Tea.