Almond Roll

Among the recipes my Mum has given me, there were a few under the theme "quick Christmas sweets" and one just seemed too appealing not to try out at the earliest opportunity.

It's a Swedish recipe for "mandelrulle", which translates to almond roll. Very good for using up left-over marzipan.

Ingredients
500 g marzipan at room temperature
one orange
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
0.5 tsp ground cloves
1 dl raisins
flaked or chopped almonds for coating

Method

1. Depending on the type of marzipan, if it feels hard at room temperature, then dice it or grate it first and place in a bowl.
2. Finely grate the orange zest and add to the marzipan, along with the cinnamon, ginger,cloves and raisins.
3. Using your hand, mix together the ingredients well, ensuring that the spices are as evenly distributed as possible.
4. Transfer the mixture to a long piece of cling film, wrap tightly and shape to a sausage, about 5 cm diameter.
5. Spread out the almonds on a piece of baking paper, then carefully unwrap the marzipan sausage and transfer to the almonds and roll so that it gets coated.
6. Return the roll to the cling film and wrap tightly, then place in the fridge for an hour before slicing.

The marzipan I used was 38% almonds and fairly soft even out of the fridge. The orange zest was quite juicy, so I should have squeezed it out a little before stirring in. But I didn't and so the mixture was rather sticky and it took me a long time to shape into a sausage. I also halved the amount of cloves on my Mum's request and this was a good thing, because it was quite strong.

We had a little taste of this and it was yummy, but very, very sweet and even after a couple of hours in the fridge, it hadn't hardened much and went flat when I tried to slice it. I think using a marzipan with a higher percentage almonds might work better. I really liked it and there's room to experiment with the spices. Lundulph said all this was unnecessary and eating the marzipan as it comes is quite enough, but then he does like marzipan. In fact he went to the point of saying that it was a waste of good marzipan. I disagree and Lundulph didn't say no to a piece either.

Of course the mixture can be shaped differently, it just occurred to me that I could use my meatball maker, which I used with such success for making cake pops. Wrapped in nice paper, they would make a nice gift. Well, there's plenty of it to eat now...