Marchpane Reconstruction

NAME: Shiye, Sofia, Zhiqi, Donna
DATE AND TIME: 31/01/2015
LOCATION:Donna's apartment
SUBJECT:Marchpane reconstruction

Recipe

• To Make Marchpaine
  
  Take half a pound of blanched almonds, and of white sugar a quarter of a pound, of rosewater half an ounce, and of damask water as much. Heat the almonds with a little of the same water, and grind them til they be small. Set them on a few coals of fire til they wax thick, (unsure what will happen here…don’t know how they’d thicken without a liquid) then beat them again with the sugar, fine, then mire the sweet waters and them together, and so gather them and fashion your March-paine.
  Then take wafer cakes of the broadest making, cut them square, paste them together with a little liquor, and when you have made them as broad as will serve your purpose, have ready made a hoop of a green hazel wand, of the thickness of half an inch, on the inner side smooth and on the outer side round and smooth, without any nags. Lay this hoop upon your wafer cakes aforesaid and then fill your hoop with the gear above named, the same driven smooth above with the back of a silver spoon, as you do a tart, and cut away all the parts of the cakes, even close by the outside of the hoop with a sharp knife that it may be round, then having white paper underneath it, set it upon a warm hearth or upon an instrument of iron or brass made for the same purpose, or into an oven, after the bread is taken out, so it be not stopped, it may not bake, but only be hard and thorough dried, and you may while it is moist, stick it full of comfetts of sundry colors in a comely order, ye must moist it over with rosewater and sugar together, make it smooth and so set it in the oven or other instrument, the clearer it is like a lantern horn, so much the more recommended. If it be through dried and kept in a dry and warm air, a Marchpaine will last many years. It is a comfortable meat, meet for weak folks, such as have lost the taste of meats by much and long sickness. The greatest secret that is in making of this clear, is with a little fine flour of rice, rosewater and sugar beaten together and laid thin over the Marchpaine, ere it go to drying. This will make it shine like ice, as ladies report.

First Wafer

Ingredients

• Mix egg white from two organic eggs with 8 sprays of rosewater, then add flour, salt, and organic sugar.

Process

• Put the gas stove on 6 and preheat the crepe pan (we use crepe pan as a substitute for iron). (Sophia has prior crepe experience so we let her make the first one.)
• Pour the wafer on the pan, spread it a little with the crepe paddle, and flip it when it has bubbles on top.
• put the wafer on a plate when the other side is ready and place another plate on top of it to flatten it.

Second Wafer

Ingredients

• This time we used cold eggs just taken out of refrigerator and we added more rosewater to make it thinner.

Process

• Sophia rolled the pan to spread the wafer because it was thinner this time.
• The wafer was sticking to the pan more, and it had different texture from the first one. We made three big wafers and a baby one.

Almonds

Process

• We set the stove on low heat and heat the almonds with 10 sprays of rosewater to give the almonds a sweet flavor. We did a taste test when the almonds started to get warm, and we turned off the stove when they started to make crackling sound (approximately 10 mins). We put it in a bowl to cool it.
• We reheated the oven to 500 degree fahrenheit to roast the beef (which was our dinner). The beef was roasted at 500 degree for 20 mins and we turned off the oven and cooked it for another 45 mins. We planned to use the low temperature waste heat to bake the marchpane.
• We ground the almonds using a power blender with a chopper grinder attachment. The almond got sticky and creamy.
• The recipe says to rest the almonds with sugar and rosewater on a few coals till they wax thick. We do not have coals so we putt stove on the lowest setting and heated the almond flour in a steel wok, after 1 min, it got thicker. We were discussing whether to take the almond flour off the heat to add suffer and rosewater or just leave it on the heat (it is not clarified on the recipe), and we decided to leave it on the heat and added half a cup of sugar (approximately a quarter pound) and half ounce of rosewater.
• We heated the almond flour for approximately 7mins40s and we did a taste test and found our that rosewater was the dominant flavor.

Marchpane Fabrication

Process

• We joined the three wafers together with rosewater and cut them in square shape.
• We used a non-toxic plastic tubing as a substitute for green hazel rod. We cut the tubing into three pieces and each of us made a different-shaped mode out of the tubing using tapes.
• We put the almond flour in the modes and flatten it with a spoon.
• We made the icing by mixing sugar, flour, and rosewater, and put it on top of the almond flour using a watercolor brush.
• Finally we put our marchpane into the oven 25mins after the roasted beef was done.
• After a wonderful dinner (thanks to Donna) we took the marchpane out and found out it was undercooked so we set the oven at 170 degree fahrenheit and leave the marchpane in it while it heated up.
• We took it out after 15mins and it’s done!

Gilding

• The last step was to gild it. First we used the rosewater to moist the marchpane. We used another watercolor brush to place the gold leaves on top of it and tapped it gently to make it stick on top. It's next to impossible to do elegantly.