Little marzipan honey bees for all your Rosh Hashanah dessert garnishing needs! Just a few ingredients needed—slivered almonds, melted chocolate, marzipan, honey, and edible gold leaf—and they’d make for such a sweet addition to a traditional honey or apple cake. There are so many versions of these floating around, but I have to give credit to Frances Quinn for the edible gold leaf idea; it imparts so much elegance to them. Suffice it to say, I love these very much and have strewn them atop many a baked good lately…so kindly prepare yourself for their reappearance(s) in several other posts around the blog this week. Full tutorial below!
Marzipan Honey Bees
- Yield: 40+ “bees” (depends on size) 1x
Description
The sweetest garnish for a Rosh Hashanah dessert (or any edible, bee-themed creation). Here’s how to make them.
Ingredients
- 7 ounces marzipan
- Slivered almonds
- 1 tablespoon honey
- Fine-tip, food-safe paintbrush
- Edible gold leaf (I used about 10 1.5-by-1.5 inch sheets, but recommend investing in a few more if possible—gold leaf can be tricky to work with)
- Culinary tweezers (for handling the gold leaf; it’s pretty necessary!)
- 1/4 cup chocolate chips, melted
Instructions
- Divide the marzipan into small pieces of equal size—as big as you’d like the body of your “honey bee” to be. (You’ll likely be able to get Use the palms of your hands to roll each piece into an oval shape. Set aside.
- Use a fine-tip paintbrush to dab a barely-there amount of honey onto the curved end of each slivered almond “wing.” Once you’ve finished adding honey to all of them, carefully use the tweezers to apply a small amount of gold leaf (a minuscule amount goes a long way visually) on top of the honey “glue.” Gold leaf can be very tricky to work with; this is why I recommend first prepping all of the almond slices with honey—if too much gets onto your tweezers, you can always quickly transfer it over to a second (or third!) almond slice to make sure the extra bits don’t get wasted. A little stickiness and mess is to be expected!
- Once all of the almond “wings” have been added to the marzipan, use the brush to paint three chocolate lines along the top of the bee “body” to represent the stripes of a honeybee, then add two dabs of chocolate on one of the curved sides of the marzipan to represent the eyes. Use to garnish Rosh Hashanah desserts and other edible, bee-themed creations!
Notes
- Storage: If you don’t intend to use these garnishes within a day or two, refrigerate them! Depending on the shelf life of the marzipan you purchased or made, you should be able to keep the finished bees in the fridge for at least one week and up to two weeks.