Vegetable cake - Marzipan spring cake

Vegetable cake - Marzipan spring wedding cake

This marzipan vegetable crate cake consists in fruit cake covered with a layer of brown marzipan and four brown marzipan sides. Marzipan vegetable cakes are very seasonal and most commonly used as spring cakes or as spring wedding cakes.

The marzipan vegetables used to create this cake are marzipan lettuce, parsnips, aubergines (egg plant), tomatoes, corn, carrots, radishes, peas, orange pumpkins, green pumpkins, long pumpkins, yellow peppers, cauliflowers and potatoes.

Vegetable cake - click here to see larger picture.

This marzipan potato started off as plain white marzipan, a cream tint of paste food coloring was added to the paste which was than kneaded to distribute the color evenly and than modelled from a sphere to an oval potato shape. A chestnut brown color was sprayed onto the marzipan potato through an airbrush to give the shape a more natural look. To make the marzipan potato appear more realistic another layer of the same color brown was sprayed again, this time to create a droplet texture effect and to emphasize the contours.

marzipan book

Marzipan potato

The marzipan potato was then hand painted with confectioners varnish to give it a high gloss finish. All the other marzipan vegetable shapes were created in a similar way. The crate sides were made using a thin layer of brown marzipan. As the marzipan would have been too soft to stand on its own, a layer of dark melted chocolate was spread over the rolled out marzipan, once dry the chocolate provided the rigidity to hold the layer of marzipan in a standing vertical position.

Marzipan vegetables

The four reinforced marzipan sides were placed around the cake to look like a crate, only later the marzipan vegetables were placed inside the crate.