[Sca-cooks] Roman silliness

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

Thanks! It was a lot of fun to do, if tiring.

It was just about 2 feet long, actually. My partner-in-crime is the Edwin
mentioned as the photographer (which is why he does not appear in any of
the photos). He is responsible for the original insistence on having
chariots, as I'd said, and the non-fiddly parts of the assembly. I got to
do the heavy construction, the frosting, and the fiddly parts of the
decorating.

I am the chambray-clad torso in the pictures--he somehow managed to avoid
my head entirely each time.

I think it took two or three evenings, including the making of the
marzipan but not including the various shopping trips for supplies and
whatnot. It's all a blur, really.

The pieces of cake are held together with some of the pretzel rods that
didn't get covered in ivory coating so that all parts of it would be
edible.

IIRC, the components are: lots of chocolate and yellow cake, those wafer
cookies, the mini pretzel rods (some dipped in ivory coating, some not),
animal crackers, marzipan, Sixlets (basically round M&M-like things),
gummi bears, animal crackers, seven gold-foil wrapped chocolate eggs, Life
Savers <tm> royal icing, decorator buttercream, and a lion animal cracker
sprayed heavily with edible spray gold dust (because I couldn't find the
powdere). The chariots were painted with an icing sugar/water glaze
colored with paste icing color.

The best animal crackers turned out to be Nabisco--they have the best
detailing and texture of all the various ones we tried. The brand that
claimed to have barnyard animals did not have a horse as portrayed on the
box, and also had an elephant, which we were fairly sure was not usually
considered a barnyard animal.

The marzipan was extremely sticky, more so than I had remembered, because
apparently we'd always used ground almonds rather than commercial almond
paste. It took 12 ounces of fondant and 8 ounces of icing sugar, total.

Most of the rest of the marzipan was then shaped into small
1"x.5"x.5" rectangles and covered in dark chocolate for my mother (the
dipping of which was an adventure in itself).

Margaret



On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Olwen the Odd wrote:

>
> Margaret, that was really great!  I looked to be over three feet long.  What
> were the demensions?  How long did it take to construct?  Did you work on it
> yourself or who helped.  Very good use of "makings" material.  I cann't wait
> to show it to our cooks guild.  Thanks so much for taking and posting the
> pictures!
> Olwen
>
> >So the college group that I was up until very recently affiliated with had
> >a Roman-themed event back at the beginning of March (the current Prince is
> >Roman, the Princess is Mongolian, we've had a lot of Roman and Mongolian
> >themes running around this reign for some reason :-)) and I was asked to
> >do a soeteltie. Didn't have to be period materials, just had to be edible
> >and look cool.
> >
> >Well, my partner in crime wanted chariots, so we ended up doing the Circus
> >Maximus out of cake and a number of other things mostly comprised of
> >sugar. The pictures of the circus are towards the bottom of the page:
> >
> >http://blackmail.melm.org/roman-around
> >
> >If there is ever another one it will need to be larger and more detailed.
> >
> >Margaret
> >
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