Tag Archive for: marzipan

Simnel Cake Ice Cream

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Simnel Cake ice cream

I am not religious, but I do enjoy all the major Christian holidays, chiefly because they are all held together with copious amounts of marzipan. I love marzipan. I’m that person that will eat the spare almond paste off your Royal icing when you’re defeated by Christmas cake or buy a block of it to eat slices off. And don’t get me started about those exquisite little fruits modelled from the stuff you get in posh grocers and Fortnums. I am definitely in the pro-camp.

I spend a lot of time wanting to increase the ways I can get marzipan into my life, so Easter and its siren song of Simnel cake pleases me hugely. I toyed with these mini ones from Nutmegs Seven which look light as a feather, but I’ve also been fiddling around with trying a marzipan ice cream for ages and suddenly it came together and I realised my world needed Simnel cake ice cream immediately.

You could of course bake a Simnel Cake and break it up into homemade ice cream and bob’s your uncle, but I have a deep shuddering hatred of wet cake. Things like trifle and tiramisu make me feel funny inside. So I needed something more deconstructed, but simple and I think, with this recipe, I’ve cracked it:

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Semlor

Semlor, or Mardi Gras with marzipan…

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After a very long wait since Easter is so late this year, Fat Tuesday finally rolled round this week with its myriad delicious ways to use up rich or fatty ingredients and shrive in time for the start of Lent. Most people went for the always excellent pancake as their Shrove Tuesday treat, but after my recent trips to Scandivanian Kitchen, I decided to celebrate with the Swedish favourite of the cardamom infused, marzipan stuffed and cream filled buns known as semlor. Made with fresh yeast and similar in texture to a doughnut, these chewy soft buns are perfect with a strong coffee and could be sampled in the afternoon, leaving plenty of room for a pancake fest in the evening…

Scandinavian Kitchen are a one stop shop for these little beauties, supplying both the recipe and all the ingredients for them in one place. I stocked up on fresh yeast there for the amazingly bargain price of 45p a pack, but used my own flour and some marzipan I had in the house for emergencies. With the sun shining for the first time in months, I rolled my sleeves up and got baking. Read more