As Christmas last year approached, the Xmas parties started following each other in rapid succession. For my church home group Christmas party, I was (as I expected) asked to provide the dessert. I wanted to make something good, but still something that wasn't too work intensive, and preferrably something with a Christmas feel to it. I might need to explain here to the non-Swedes out there that in Sweden, saffron is very strongly associated with Christmas as it's main use in the Swedish kitchen is for the "lussekatter" Lucia buns that are traditionally eaten on December 13 (but also throughout the rest of December). Given these parameters, I remembered a sort of saffron ice cream on a base of an almond meringue cake that Tomas Johansson, an old friend and colleague, had served us at work several years ago. Thus, I contacted him and he graciously obliged and provided me with the recipe.
I finished the cake without any problems, but still had a little bit of time and a bit too much creativity, so I wanted to do some decoration for the cake. Another Swedish Christmas tradition is to make marcipan pigs and Santas, so I decided I would make a marcipan Santa.
Of course I didn't have any marcipan, but I did have left-over almond paste from making the cake, and marcipan is basically the same as almond paste, just with higher suger percentage, so if you knead almond paste with icing sugar, you get a pretty good approximation of marcipan.
I divided the marcipan into smaller pieces and used food coloring to color one piece red. A smaller piece that was going to end up being the head of the Santa was kneaded together with a very small piece of red marcipan to get something that is close to skin color.
Now I could start modelling the Santa figure. A piece of skin colored marcipan was rolled into a ball and then slightly squished to give it a head shape. Using a knife and a match, I did some sculpting of this head to create facial features. The result ended up being better than I had expected (I tend to make things that taste good, but the artistic side of making cakes is usually not my biggest strength). The big red piece of marcipan was sculpted into the body - both the torso, arms, and legs were made from the same piece of marcipan.
I had made the decision that I wanted my little guy to be able to stand up, but the marcipan body (which was almost 10 cm tall) was not rigid enough, so I had to add some extra support by impaling the poor thing with a match (note: this means that you should be very careful if someone would get the idea to eat the creation). A toothpick would have been better, but I didn't have any toothpicks. Similarly, I also stuck matches up through the legs to give them stability (and left a piece sticking out to make it easier to attach the feet.
Next were the feet and the belt. One of the problems here was that I only had red food coloring and I had already used that to make the red suit and the "skin colored" head. The boots and belt should be rather dark. Fortunately I had some chocolate flakes (100% cocoa content) that are meant to be used for making drinking chocolate, but I'll take whatever I can get. I kneaded some of this into another piece of marcipan to create a brown marcipan and then formed small boots to attach to his legs and a long thin stretch to wrap around him as a belt. The combination of the chocolate flakes and the marcipan wasn't great as it caused the marcipan to become to fragile and easily wanting to fall apart. Next time I might try to just use some cocoa powder instead.
Gloves were made out of uncolored marcipan, and the same for the beard (which I dusted with icing sugar to make it a bit whiter). The head was stuck onto the body (once again using a match for support, and a hat was formed from more red marcipan together with some uncolored marcipan for the whiter details on it.
Almost done. There was still a problem though. He didn't have any eyes, just holes where they were supposed to be. This was obviously a problem as I (as mentioned before) only had red food coloring (and we don't want Santa to have red eyes). I figured I would use the chocolate for the eyes, when I came up with another idea.
I had a bag of "Vicks Blue" in a cupboard. Vicks Blue is a Swedish lozenge for sore throats and as the name suggests, it has a very bright blue color. So, take one Vicks Blue, take out your trusted mortar and pestle and crush it. You now have tiny pieces of blue "crystals", perfect for making eyes to your little marcipan Santa.
Below follows first the recipe for the saffron ice cream cake, and then photos of the cake, and finally photos of me decoration.
Saffron ice cream cake
(recipe courtesy of Tomas Johansson)
Crust:
300 g almond paste (commonly available in Swedish stores - if you can't find it, you can make your own by grinding almonds together with sugar (150g almonds/150g sugar) in a food processor)
3 egg whites
1-1 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder
Ice cream:
3 egg yolks
100 ml sugar
150 ml milk (3% fat content)
1 pack of saffron, 0.5 g
200 ml heavy cream
Preheat the oven to 200º C. Line the bottom of a 23cm (9inch) spring form pan with baking paper and grease it. Shred the almond paste thinly. Whip the egg whites until firm peaks form. Carefully fold the almond paste into the egg whites. Sift the cocoa powder into the egg white mixture and fold. Pour the mixture into the spring form pan and bake in the lower part of the over approximately 20 minutes. Let the cake cool in the pan.
Mix egg yolks, sugar, milk, and saffron in a sauce pan. Bring to a boil and simmer on low heat while constantly stirring until it reaches a creamy consistency. Let the mixture cool. Whip the cream and fold it into the saffron mixture.
Let the cake/crust remain in the spring form pan and pour the ice cream mixture over it. Freeze the cake for at least 4 hours. Remove from freezer approximately 30 minutes before serving.
Some of the flowers we piped
