Molding Marzipan

There's more than one way to make a marzipan pig, and working with marzipan is a bit like working with clay.  You can shape it by hand and mold it.  You can also put it in a mold (although that is not like clay, as you want your marzipan to be stiff, not like slip for clay).  I decided to use some of the vintage marzipan molds I got a few years back, and mold up some marzipan pigs for the New Year to bring health, wealth, and luck.  I figure I can use all of that I can get.

While you can use commercially available marzipan, I like to make my own.  Why?  Because I can control the sweetness of the final product.  I find most commercial marzipan paste too sweet for my taste.  I like to actually taste the almonds.  The downside might be that the marzipan I make is never going to be as smooth as the commercial brands, because I use the food processor to make mine, while the commercial brands employ special equipment to get that fine texture.  But I've come to prefer a bit of texture, and really appreciate the flavor less sugar gives in the final product.  I pretty much bring the food processors to the brink of disaster running them for so long to get the texture as fine as I can.  Someday I'll have a professional processor and a whole new world of marzipan texture will open up for me, but until that day, I'm happy with what I've got.

Marzipan is sticky.  It wants to stick to the molds.  I had the hardest time working with the molds.  Some folks said to grease the molds.  Some said to dust with confectioners sugar.  Some said to line with plastic wrap (?).  What worked for me was filling the molds as is, and then popping them in the freezer for a bit.  

Here's what the piggies looked like in all their naked glory after they were unmolded.  They have to sit for a day to dry a bit before they get decorated.

The tallest is about 3 inches high.  The smallest about an inch.  I guess a little marzipan goes a long way.

Some of the molds that came over in the shipment from Belgium had the actual positive figure with them made from lead.  No wonder the shipment was so heavy!