On Adventures with Marzipan

Note: If you'd like to read this humorous anecdote without the cooking details, skip the blue text.
 
          For a couple months, I’ve kept a perpetual tab open in Firefox with a recipe for marzipan.  
          For a couple weeks, I’ve had two cans of almond paste sitting ready in my plastic kitchen drawers.  
          Finally, on Friday, I resolved to make the recipe, but to get ideas for shapes, I first watched a couple online videos in which two women (with delightful British accents) demonstrated how to form marzipan roses and animals.  I decided to start with the former. 
           Mentally prepared, I readied my kitchen space and began.  I found it relatively easy to mix the almond paste, powdered sugar, and corn syrup.  Once it formed into a proper ball, I separated a small portion of the light beige dough, and then encircled the rest in plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge for safekeeping.   
           At that point, to continue following the recipe required that I flaunt the video’s advice against liquid food coloring.  I bit my lip and hoped it would turn out well.  A couple drops of red dye got me a nice pink shade, and a little more powdered sugar made up for any additional stickiness.  I rolled it out, only mildly inconvenienced by my long wooden rolling pin in the tight quarters of my kitchen.  

           Lacking a rose-petal-shaped cookie cutter (which looks like a one-inch-long tear drop), I cut approximate shapes out with a knife.  I had to then pinch the round edge to thin the marzipan to a petal-like thickness, so the jagged edges weren’t much of an issue.  The first petal wrapped around a small cone of marzipan.  The round portion of the tear-drop petal lay fractionally above the tip of the cone, and the petal’s sides overlapped just slightly.  A little delicate pinching adhered it to the cone, and a little more pinching around the tip curled one part of the marzipan petal outward.  Three more petals, one inside the next, wrapped around this first petal, again rising slightly above and curled outward.  I stopped there, with a bud, on my first try, deeming the final round of five a bit too unwieldy to manage at first.  I cut off the rose’s ugly “stem” and set both aside. 

  

           With my second effort, I attempted the layer of five, but by that point, I had to wet the tip of my finger and dab the drying round ends of the marzipan so they’d pinch and flatten properly.  Unfortunately, this made them so sticky they tore easily, and I had to constantly re-coat my fingers in powdered sugar, giving the petals an uneven coating of “snow.”  Still, I felt fairly pleased with the result, but with the third and fourth roses, it grew harder and harder to keep the balance between stickiness and dryness, and the petals grew harder and harder to peel off the cutting board, so I scraped the whole pink lot back into a ball, wrapped it in plastic, and banished it to the fridge.  The finished roses made their way into a Gladware container (whose lid I always fear I’ll tear when I try to pry it open) and followed in the wake of the marzipan dough balls.

           Now, Joel and I planned to entertain guests Monday night: Joel’s former college roommate, Andrew Wallace, and his fiancé, Sam, would be driving through the area.  They’d requested chicken pot pie, which I looked forward to making, and I envisioned a dessert of personal apple pies—a simple but somewhat time-consuming recipe I’d tried out a few weeks before.  I made sure to acquire all the ingredients, and with our guests in mind, I also decided to make more marzipan roses as an extra treat.  Thus, I set to work Sunday afternoon before our Easter choir practice.  I left the neutral-colored ball alone, but re-thawed and re-rolled the pink marzipan ball.  I managed perhaps six or seven more roses before the same problem forced me to reevaluate my plan. 
           I reformed the ball with a little water, then kneaded, rerolled, and flattened it.  Frustrated with the irregular results achieved by knife cutting, I tried using the small end of my melon baller to cut round petals.  It worked rather well, though I had to run powdered-sugar-coated fingers around the melon baller's lip between cuts to keep the marzipan dough from sticking inside it.  These round pieces seemed impractical to form a rose, and at any rate, roses were time-consuming.  Time was running out before practice, so I experimented with arranging the round pieces roughly in the shape of a violet.  The effect wasn’t as realistic as the roses, so I stopped after two and put the completed flowers back in the fridge.  I wasted a few minutes molding the remaining ball of pink marzipan into an animal head (using my own judgement rather than advice from the online videos).  No matter how I pinched and pushed it, I couldn't decide if it looked more like a cat, a pig, or a cow, so I mashed it back into a ball and returned it to the fridge, rewrapped in plastic.

           Today, after work and a visit to Aunt Margie, I arrived home at 3:30 pm ready to prepare our meal as planned.  I readied my work area and first prepared the dough for the pot pie's crust.  The first time I had made the dough—for a pumpkin pie—I’d successfully modified Betty Crocker’s recipe by adding about a tablespoon of sugar per batch.  This I did, wondering if perhaps it was too much for a savory dish, but trusting what I’d written in the past.  I split the dough in half, wrapped the one half that would become the pie’s top in plastic and stuck it in the fridge, a shelf above the unshaped balls of marzipan.  The other half I rolled out and laid beautifully in the pie pan.  After trimming the edges of the dough, I laid plastic over that, too, and set it aside.
           Next came the chicken.  I started cutting fat off the chicken thighs and then cutting the chicken into bits… and then cutting some more… and yet more.  Joel got home, took his shower, came out, and I was still cutting chicken.  I lamented internally that I hadn't cut it the night before.  I kept glancing at the clock, gauging my time, and put Joel to work setting the table and washing dishes.  While I stirred the still-heating gravy for the pot pie, I asked him to peel and chop the carrots.  Noticing his careful speed at the cutting board, however, I suggested we swap roles so that I might chop them in half the time. 
           Now sweaty from working over the stove and with a sore back from standing still so long, I was eager for a shower and change of clothes before our guests arrived.  I had a half hour in which to do so—then fifteen minutes—then ten.  In haste once all was ready, I dumped the peas, carrots, and drained chicken into the boiling gravy Joel had dutifully kept from burning, pulled the pie pan from the oven where the bottom crust had been partially pre-cooked, dumped the innards in the shell, and grabbed a tan ball of dough from the fridge—cursing my foolishness for keeping it in there where it had gotten hard in the cold. 
            By bearing heavily on my floured rolling pin, I managed to roll the dough out on my flour-coated cutting board, but it kept trying to tear at the edges.  I feared I had gotten the marzipan by mistake for a moment.  A tiny pinch tasted like flour rather than sugar—good.  I carefully laid it over the pie, cut the excess dough, and pinched the edges together.  The lot went in the over for thirty-five minutes while I went in the shower for about five—all the time I had until our guests were due to arrive.
           I emerged in record time with several minutes to spare; our guests were running late, having first gone to the wrong house.  I knew the apple dessert would be impossible to prepare in time, but if they didn’t mind a child's treat, I decided I'd bake the scraps from the pie pastry—spread with a thin layer of margarine and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. 
           Our guests arrived as I prepared the dessert.  We greeted Andrew and were introduced to Sam—a delightful young woman—and I set tea to brewing and finished our dessert, which they confirmed sounded great.
           A few minutes of talk later, the timer buzzed for the pot pie.  I opened the oven… and stared in horror at my pie's blackened top.  How could this have happened?  I felt horribly embarrassed and apologized to Sam, who entered and witnessed the catastrophe I drew out of the oven.  She kindly assured me that her family’s exploits with cooking were much the same, so she didn’t mind.  I still felt awful—and perplexed.  This had never happened to me before!  I’d made pies overly brown a time or two, but never charred black!  It had also spilled into the oven—what a mess that would be to clean!  I supposed I must have set the heat on 450 instead of 425, but even as I said it, I remembered turning the dial carefully between 400 and 450.
           I stuck the dessert in the slowly-cooling oven and set about cutting (unwisely early) into the liquid-y pie with my triangular metal pie spatula.  The top crust seemed unusually thin and loose, but fortunately the charring didn’t extend very deeply, and Andrew assured me the rest of it looked and smelled quite tasty.  However, it soon became clear that my utensil’s holes would be problematic when it came time to lift the pieces onto our plates.  The others gave various suggestions, including using a wider spatula.  With a self-mocking smile, I wordlessly drew out a soup ladle and pulled out bowls in which to place the soupy mess.  This worked quite well, and we sat down to enjoy the meal.
           I was somewhat relieved that my first bite did not taste charred—however, it tasted unusually sweet instead.  I apologized again, feeling not a little distressed—what must they think of my cooking abilities?—and speculated that I may have used too much sugar in the crust, which might be another reason why it had blackened... but I didn't quite believe it.  I also noted that chicken thighs were also naturally sweeter than the typical chicken breasts used in this dish, but again, I wasn't convinced it could turn the pie this sweet.  Andrew said he actually liked the sweetness.  Encouraged, I acknowledged the unintended—but admittedly not unpleasant result—with no further complaint, and we ate and talked steadily of old college professors.
           When the kitchen timer went off, at first I didn’t know what it was for.  I rose and displaced Andrew to turn it off, supposing aloud that I must have accidentally set it when I turned it off earlier.   It wasn't until I had moved past poor Andrew again toward my seat that I remembered the dessert.  I stumbled returning to the oven (as if I needed to be more embarrassed).  I slid on my trusty red oven mitt and opened the door—upon dark brown bits of matter.  
           Not again! my heart cried as I tried to pry the melty bits up… and then logic caught up with my initial emotion: Pie pastry did not bloat or melt like this when charred.  Despite its crusty appearance, it also scraped easily from the pan—too easily, for it scrunched like soggy bread.
           That’s when I realized what must have happened.  I opened the fridge.  Yes—there was the ball of pie pastry.  I laughed as I related what had happened: The dough I’d grabbed and rolled out for the top of our pie had been the neutral-colored marzipan!  The pinch I'd taste-tested had been full of flour from rolling it out!
           We found that the baked marzipan “dessert” tasted fairly good, but as it cooled, the sugar made it nearly impossible to scrape off the pan—the heat reacted with the sugar so that when it cooled, it formed a hard candy.  After getting only a third off the pan and onto Sam and Andrew’s plates, I was forced to soak the rest in water, giving it up as lost.  
           Our guests enjoyed the treat, peculiar and unintended though it was.  We joked about kitchen accidents becoming inventions, and I shared how I created my recipe for potato soup from a mix-up while making my first chicken pot pie.  This incident reminded me to pull out the marzipan roses so Andrew and Sam could experience what marzipan was supposed to look and taste like.  (Which, unfortunately, wasn't as tasty as the rounds of Mexican marzipan that I remember my dad giving us as kids, but it served its purpose.)  Thus, despite everything, the catastrophic meal still turned out well and was followed by a fun game of Castle Panic and then Carcassonne, accompanied by much laughter and conversation.

           The moral—every catastrophe has a silver lining, so don’t get too upset over it. 
           Another lesson—marzipan chicken pot pie tastes surprisingly good, though in the future, I recommend using less marzipan.  To prevent burning, add it in bits below some real pastry dough--or add the marzipan topping about eight minutes before the pie is to emerge. 
           A third lesson—if you bake marzipan, cook it at less than 400 degrees for less than 10 minutes (how much less will be a matter of experimentation), and scrape it onto wax paper immediately to avoid an inedible, rock-hard mess.