Marzipan recipes have been around, and essentially unchanged for 1000 years – an ancient version is in Al-Baghdadi’s Kitab al-Tabikh or “Book of Dishes”.
Crush almonds, add sugar, egg whites – I also added a little cream of tartar (Potassium bitartrate – which forms in wine casks during fermentation) which increases the heat tolerance of egg whites and slows the crystal formation of the sugar.
Cook, cool, knead, color – but really, what to do with marzipan?
I tried it on some children — ages 3-6 — but nothing about it really held their attention. It doesn’t mold well enough to be entertaining as a toy, and it’s sweetness is, apparently, too cloying even for sugar starved children. Even after I added food coloring and started them off with a crocodile and a couple of cherries (are those cherries?), nothing. Impossibly, it seems that marzipan resonates as more dated — except for as pure decoration — than most of the stuff I cook here.
I am very fond of marzipan in all its styles & shapes. I recommend dark chocolate covered marzipan – a delightful comestible!
Extremely belated comment: B gets marzipan for xmas every year, but somehow I only tried it just this week. It brought back wonderful memories of when my sister and I would whip up a batch of cookie dough after school (latchkey kids), chill it in the back of the fridge where no one would notice, and slice off discs all the next evening to melt in the mouth. We had a heavy hand when it came to almond extract, and that smell still gets me. The marzipan texture seemed similar to that dough as well.