T minus 3 sleeps! Can you believe it? After all these weeks of baking and cooking and veganising jelly the time has nearly come to get down to the good stuff. The actual eating.
There is one small job left to do – decorating the Christmas cake, which should have been nicely fed with brandy for the last four weeks and be smelling absolutely delicious!
As it’s a traditional cake I’m decorating it traditionally, with a layer of marzipan and a layer of fondant icing. And I’m sticking to another tradition as well.
For as long as I can remember, Pa Yogini has made the marzipan. He’d put Christmas carols on the radio and get himself and the kitchen in a sticky mess. Then I would eat too much of the marzipan and feel sick, not leaving enough to cover the cake!
So I used Pa Yogini’s ancient recipe but rather than a beaten egg, this year I used a flax egg. Turns out not only does this work a charm, but it also doesn’t create the sticky mess that egg laden marzipan makes, thus saving Pa’s clothes and making Ma Yogini happy.
Veganism 2 Eggs 0
Ingredients
6oz/175g icing sugar
6oz/175g ground almonds
1 flax egg
1 teaspoon almond essence
Make up your flax egg and add the almond essence to the mix – leave it to settle for 10 minutes
Mix together the sugar and almonds. Make a well in the middle and add your flax egg. Mix together with a fork. After a while it will seem as though the ingredients will never bind into a ball of marzipan, that’s when you need to get your hands in there and create the ball, just as if you’re making pastry.
Eventually it will look like this.
Roll it out flat with a rolling pin (making sure you cover the surface with icing sugar so it doesn’t stick) and set it to one side.
You’ll then need some apricot glaze or jam. Put about a tablespoonful in a cup and microwave it for 30 seconds until it has melted. Then brush it over your cake with a pastry brush.
Lay the marzipan over the top and press down. You might want to roll the top with your rolling pin to make sure you have a flat surface for the icing.
Ideally, you should leave it overnight before you put the icing on, but try and leave it for a at least half an hour if you have time.
Now here’s where I cheated. Honestly I couldn’t work out a suitable way of making either royal or fondant icing without egg whites and as I was running out of time I bought some Ready to Roll Fondant Icing from the Co-op which assures me it is vegan. It has some rather horrible looking ingredients so I am determined to figure this out for next year, but cake is hardly full of the most nutritional ingredients anyway so it will have to do.
Basically you treat the icing in the same way as the cake – roll it out on an icing-sugared surface then slightly dampen the marzipan layer with water to make it sticky and place the icing on top. Press it down and roll it flat.
And then get a funky ribbon to cover up the untidy edges (or y’know, be less lazy than me and take the icing right down to the bottom!).
So there you have it. A very vegan Christmas. I have to say that it has been more of a success than I thought. I never thought the jelly or the marzipan would work – and what do you know!
Thank you as ever for reading, and I hope you enjoy some or all of these recipes this festive season!
