19 December 2015

Welcome, once again, to my Danish Christmas Advent Calendar! Every day I’ll be giving you a little peak into how our family celebrates Christmas here in Copenhagen. Do the Danes love Christmas? Um, yes – they even use the word Christmas as a verb… Vi juler! (We are ‘christmasing’!)

So get comfy, put your feet up, grab a cup of something warm, and prepare for an avalanche of hygge!

19 December 2015

Danish supermarkets are pushing lots of marcipan (the bog-standard yellow kind, plus some rainbow colours) right now…

You’ll also see tons of Danish nougat (a very soft brown fudge, not to be confused with French white nougat or Spanish túrro) for sale.

If you take marcipan + nougat + some dried fruits (dates, apricots, crystallised ginger, etc)…

…and plenty of chocolate, then you are ready to make konfekt! Danish homemade sweets. You’ll typically see konfekt served at Christmas, as party food or at the end of a meal instead of dessert. Here’s what we’ll normally munch on when watching the day’s installment of the children’s tv Christmas calendar, along with some clementines and a cup of Christmas tea.

Need a few ideas to get you started? Take some marcipan, a large bar of chocolate and whatever else you have on hand: dried apricots, dates, Smarties or M+Ms, tiny marshmallows, coconut, icing sugar, edible gold, food colouring and tiny paper cases… Roll out the marcipan and cut into shapes. Or take a date and ‘stuff’ it with marcipan, then dip in chocolate. Or cut up some apricots, and put a piece inside a ball of marcipan and roll in icing sugar, coconut or chopped nuts. Soak some raisins in cognac for a couple of days, then spoon into tiny cases and cover with chocolate. Anything goes!

Enlist the help of some little elves. Though keep your eye on them because they eat rather copious amounts of marcipan etc while they work…

If you want to be more creative, just ‘google’ pictures of konfekt. You can do nougat-filled-yule-logs, coconut balls, boozy flavoured marcipan etc, etc, etc… (If you’re a Danish marcipan freak like me, then you must try making a fabulous Danish cake – Mazarinkage. My recipe for that is right here.) But this is our family-favourite-five-minute-konfekt. The hardest part? Waiting it for the chocolate to dry!

This year we also made some marcipan snitter (slices) by rolling out three different colours/flavours of marcipan, layering them up, pressing them together and cutting them into diamond shapes. Not that I’ll be eating any of these myself – they’re mindnumbingly sweet. Give me chocolate instead, please! 😉