Chocolate Covered Marzipan

Christmas is just around the corner (and I love it, I love Christmas so much that I once wrote a song called “Hurry Up Christmas”) and it’s time to get your Christmas prep on.

Marzipan is a really Christmassy thing to me, and I use it quite a lot in my festive baking, like the absolutely delicious apple and marzipan pie, and the classic Stollen. I never really thought that 

marzipan would be easy to make, I didn’t even know if it was possible to make in a home kitchen.

And then GBBO had a marzipan task. Challenge accepted, Berry.

And it turns out it’s pretty easy, and it’s nice to work with. I’ll be making my own marzipan exclusively from now on. This is a win!

Makes approx. 500g marzipan, enough to cover a small cake, or about 60 chocolate covered morsels

Ingredients

• 90g golden caster sugar
• 140g icing sugar, plus extra for kneeding
• 1 tbsp vanilla sugar
• 225g ground almonds
• 1 egg
• ½ tsp lemon juice
• 50g dark chocolate
• 50g milk chocolate

Method

Mix together the sugars and almonds until combined.

Make a well in the centre and crack in the egg and pour in the lemon juice.

Using a knife, mix in the egg to the drg ingredients. When combined, tip onto a board that’s lightly coated in icing sugar.

Kneed briefly until it all comes together.  I halved it at this point, half for a pie tomorrow and half to cover in chocolate!

Roll out to a thickness of about 1.5cm and cut out to your desired shapes.

Place on a lined baking tray and place in the fridge for 30-60 minutes (I don’t know if you’re meant to do that with marzipan, but I wanted it slightly harder for working with).

Melt the chocolate in the microwave, carefully.

Dip the marzipan in the chocolate and place on a wire rack to harden, this will allow the excess chocolate to run off.

Store in a cool dry place.