Marzipan and Pumpkin Pie Part 1 by KimB

Nearly every holiday, I attempt to make pumpkin pie and I fail. It's almost a tradition now, Kim's annual attempt at pumpkin pie, a valiant effort to make something edible. I know it's supposed to be easy but somehow I manage to make a mess of it and it comes out in various forms fit only for the garbage can. Every holiday, Allen groans – Not again... PLEASE??? Of course, I ignore his pleas and continue to plan my attack. This year was no exception.

Marzipan. I love marzipan. Almonds made perfect. Eons ago, I made marzipan into fruit shapes and used food dye to color them. I made apples and pears and bananas. Bits of cloves made stems and blossoms, toothpicks dipped in the food dyes made fine out lines and highlights. It was great fun.

My friend D, lives on a ranch and they have some almond trees. Her husband, G, is an expert in machinery and big farm equipment. He's very clever and can make all sorts of tools and add ons for the tractors and other equipment. He made a tree shaker to harvest the almonds from their trees and then he made a mechanical nut cracker to shell them.

Every year she gives me a big bag full of shelled almonds. I put them in the freezer and eat them over the year. We have far more than we can eat though, and so there's quite a bit left over.

This year, as I thought about the pumpkin pie, I also thought about marzipan. Wouldn't some marzipan fruit be nice and it would go so well with that pumpkin pie I'm going to make? I decided I would attack on both fronts: one side marzipan and the other pumpkin pie. What could be simpler?

As I could not remember how I made the marzipan, I did the usual DuckDuckGo.com search for a recipe. The recipes seemed simple but it also was a bit more complex than I remembered but undeterred I began.

First you have to remove the brown skin from the almonds. For this you use boiling water and it appeared to be very straight forward. So I boiled the water and poured it over my almonds and then attempted to remove the skins. Hmmm, something not quite right there. The skins didn't come off that easily, at least not how the videos showed them. So I did a number of remedial actions but in the end it was 2 days and some very raw fingers before I had the skins off the almonds.

Then came the grinding part. I only have a small onion chopper that does a half onion at a time, but in went a handful of almonds and after a lot of grinding occurred, a very small amount of ground almonds remained. I looked at my BIG bucket of peeled almonds and the tiny grinder, then dashed into battle once again. About a week later, I ran out of steam and decided I'd ground all the almonds I was going to grind.

The leftover peeled almonds I toasted in the oven, which was its own side procedure, as I hadn't planned on toasted almonds but my fingers were sore and I was getting worried my little grinder would burn out if I keep on grinding.

Then I read the next part of the recipe, which was to mix up the ground almonds with brown sugar and using a candy thermometer heat to n-degrees or soft-ball stage. Oh-Oh. As soon as I read that last part I knew things were going to go down hill fast.

[Editor's note: This story is Part 1 of 3 and was written by KimB.]



Peeling Almonds