Cook Along With Rich: Christmas (in July) Cake Part 2

The cake had a bit of a rest and a feed, not much, didn’t leave long enough between bake and decorate for lots of feeding! So, in Part 2 we move to the decorating, marzipan and icing. Now if you’ve been paying attention you’ll know I like to make my own marzipan, I’ve done it several times before, so what could go wrong? Ah, an awful lot it seems...

We’ve bought some lovely new pans, we have limited space, result is the old pans had to go. The new pans are lovely stainless steel jobbies. Should be no trouble to use one. Two attempts later I bought some marzipan from the shop.

Attempt number one, the sugar burns, and is bitter and well beyond hard crackle never mind soft ball, but the candy thermometer only went a little above the 235F of softball. Attempt to clean pan, that's enough for a blog alone, in fact the pan is still soaking with after boiling with vinegar solution to try to remove some stubborn black bits.

Hmmm, I’ll try this old but still stainless steel pan, we now only have stainless steel pans... I'm feeling unsure now, but I've done this before, so I know this all works. Off we go with attempt number two. Very gentle with the heat, letting the needle plateau before turning the gas up anpother notch. Just as we're heading towards 200F the mixture starts to change colour...heat off, pan in cold water, and I have hard candy, very nice, but not what I need at all... I don’t think my thermometer is duff, but I’ll now have to check it against boiling water. I think the problem is the stainless steel pans. As I know from Salty Bessie welding of stainless steel (see Facebook) it holds the heat, i.e. a poor conductor of heat, at least for a metal, so I think the pan skin is making the mixture too hot, and also creating too much heat energy to be able to control the temperature. Previously I’ve used old battered aluminium pans. I could splash out on a fancy copper one, but I think I'll now have to buy a cheap and simple ally pan for my next marzipan making exploit.

Off to shop, buy marzipan, Not Happy JAN...but no option, and it’s only my pigheadedness for making from the ground up that’s nagging at me after all...

After that the process goes as per plan, and I can even plop a little of the hard candy on as decoration!