smitten kitchen

Some people — like my husband who claims it “tastes like medicine,” — fail to see marzipan’s charms but you won’t find any of these misguided souls on my side of the family. My mother loves marzipan, and not those little food dye brushed animals and fruits; she does not wish to eat miniature sculptures, just rolls and rolls of marzipan swaddled in bittersweet chocolate.

Whenever she makes it into the city, my mother gets her beloved Marzipan Rolls from the esteemed Li-Lac Chocolates, a place so old, my parents went there back before they were married in 1968. (Don’t you love making jokes about how old your parents are? It’s like clinging to that last thread of evidence that you could possibly still be young.) Li-Lac is one of those Village gems, a place that’s been making chocolate the same way since 1923, from a big copper kettle in the back, on marble countertops, by hand and with minimal brouhaha. There’s no color-schemed boxes lined with velvet or gold, nothing is ever pre-packed, and yes, you can actually buy one piece at a time for those of us that love quality but fear quantity. Two years ago, after the rent on Li-Lac’s Christopher Street location of 81 years was tripled, they moved eight blocks north to Jane Street, which has really only made it easier for Alex and I to sneak down there. We love the place so much, we gave out boxes of their round flavored truffles as wedding favors. They were better than the cake, but shouldn’t that go without saying?

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I am not a candy maker. Heck, I’m barely a candy eater. Stop laughing; what I mean is, I prefer truffles, buttery cookies and crumbly, fruity things. But for some reason this season, perhaps another foppish attempt at service journalism, I seem to have gotten myself fixated on candy-making. It makes little sense considering the innumerable fantastic confectioneries in this city, but I think that at least part of the appeal is the long shelf life of cooked sugar. I like the idea of that you can give these to someone over the holidays and, if kept properly, they should last through January. Of course, not if you’ve made them well.

This month’s Gourmet magazine’s recipe for Salted Chocolate Caramels did nothing to curb this desire. Alex and I fell head-over-heels in love with salted butter caramel when we went to Paris last spring and friend had told us to go to the Berhtillon glacier (ice cream shop) on Ile Saint-Louis for the express purpose of trying their marron glacee ice cream sold only in only the winter months. Quite shortly, we were informed that they were out of the marron, but I had barely any time to mourn it when the salted butter caramel ice cream caught my eye. Alex and I shared the most miniscule scoop of the most abundantly complex flavor ever to cross our apparently deprived palates; not salty per se, but bright enough to hit all the notes.

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How to make orangettes: Slice ends off four oranges, score the peel from one end to the other, and remove the peels from the oranges.

Slice the peels into thin strips and trim the edges.

Using a medium size pot, place the peels in boiling water and blanch them for a few minutes. Rinse the peels, and repeat this process a second time. This is done to remove the bitterness of the peels.

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