Marzipan Roses

 

My dear friend Ayca's oldest daughter Amina is getting married on May 29th. Her fiancee Murat is another good friend of ours. Quite a while ago, when Ayca first gave me the good news, my happiness and excitement got the better of me and I offered to help with the wedding cake. The truth is, helping was really the extent of my offer at the time, because we have another good friend who is much more experienced than me in making this kind of cake, and I was quite certain that she would rise to the challenge. However, when the date of the wedding was set last week, we found out that our friend had other commitments that week, making it impossible for her to take on this project. She said that she would be available on the day of the wedding to help construct the cake and to decorate it. That's still a big relief! Other friends offered freezer space, which also helps a lot. I hope to start baking the cake this week. Since Zeynep is on her spring break, she can help me with her sister. I will freeze the layers after I bake them. Buttercream frosting can be made ahead and frozen as well. It seems that for the coming 2 months, my bed time reading will be limited to Rose L. Beranbaum's Cake Bible, an excellent, excellent resource for brave amateurs like me. She has several recipes for wedding cakes, but more importantly, she has lookup tables you can refer to when you bake the cake in different-sized pans. She also has many decoration ideas, which brings me to the above picture, my first attempt at making marzipan roses. I tinted the marzipan with the point of a needle's worth of pink powder food coloring to get this pale shade of peach. I did not have a real rose to look at for inspiration, but still my creations resembled roses. Good enough, I say, for a first attempt. The roses have dried and become somewhat crumbly since yesterday, so it seems that they will be best made on the day of the wedding. Or, I can shape roses in advance from white chocolate modeling dough (which is not as delicious as marzipan, hence less tempting to eat). Of course, real flower decorations are the most beautiful alternative, but one has to make sure that they are pesticide-free. I foresee many decisions to make, a lot of planning and physical labor ahead of me. The preparation of a wedding cake is certainly an event worth blogging about, and I am sure that there will be many installments to this theme to come.