For most people, the ingredient of choice when it comes to making cake toppers is ready to roll icing. It comes in a huge range of colours, is easy to work with but sets just hard enough to ensure that your latest creation maintains its shape. But marzipan is a wonderful product for making cake toppers, though often overlooked.
Marzipan is great for making cake toppers, or any kind of sugar craft decorations, because it’s so easy to work with and quite forgiving. Because it comes in either white or yellow you will need to use a food paste or gel to achieve different colours, but this is simple enough to do.
If you want some ideas on what you can achieve with marzipan, here are 5 ideas for incredible marzipan cake toppers.
Marzipan Fruit. When it comes to marzipan cake toppers you’ve got to start with fruit. Not only are these a tasty little snack by themselves but because marzipan takes colour so well you can create incredibly life like fruit to pop on top of any cake. How about a marzipan orange on top of a flavoured cupcake? When adding colour be sure to use pastes as opposed to liquid as it doesn’t change the consistency of the marzipan.
Marzipan Animals. Once people have tackled the obligatory marzipan fruits the next project will tend to be an animal. Cute, cartoon-style animals are great for making with marzipan because they tend to have stumpy proportions, which means the marzipan doesn’t lose its shape. A pig is a good starting point, with its simple rounded forms.
Marzipan Flowers. Most people would opt for ready to roll icing when creating flowers, or even specialist flower and modelling paste, for the stiffer consistency.But marzipan is easier to work with thanks to its stiffer consistency, can be coloured easily and tastes delicious so can be wolfed down wholesale with the cake.
Marzipan People. Now it starts to get a little trickier. Sculpting a lifelike person from marzipan can definitely be done it just takes practice and determination. Because marzipan is very soft it’s best to make individual body parts and let them set before assembling the figures. Use either a section of dry spaghetti or cocktail sticks to pin the sections together internally for added support, but be sure to let anyone who’s going to eat them!
Marzipan Scenes. Finally, once you’ve tackled all of the above, why not bring it all together and create a brilliant marzipan diorama right on top of your cake? You can create one for any occasion with a collection of people, animals and other objects. Add all of the above together and you could make a marzipan zoo or farm, perfect for a child’s birthday cake.
So don’t leave that block of marzipan languishing at the back of the cupboard until next Christmas. Get it out and get making some incredible marzipan cake toppers.
