It’s December!
Happy December first! It’s the best month of the year (NOT up for debate, my friends) and we are so excited! December is a month of joy, family, snow, hygge, and most importantly, good food and plenty of sweets. We will be sharing lots of new Christmas recipes this year, as well as revamping some of our favorites from last year. Please follow along and try some of our festive and traditional recipes – there’s nothing quite like a Danish Christmas!
Today’s Recipe
Today’s recipe is definitely a sweet one, especially if you’re a big marzipan and chocolate fan! These are called snebolde, or snowballs. In Denmark, they are a sweet that people usually buy from the grocery store, but they are surprisingly simple to make at home! So we decided to give it a go and share the results with you! A soft center of marzipan, either storebought or homemade, covered in a hard shell of chocolate, then a light coating of icing, and powdered sugar to finish. They’re amazingly crunchy on the outside and then squishy and soft on the inside – a perfect combination of texture.
Tempering Chocolate
There is one tricky piece to this recipe – tempering the chocolate. What exactly is tempered chocolate? Well, it’s when you bring the temperature of the chocolate up and then cool it again by adding more chocolate. This results in the fats in the chocolate crystallizing more evenly and a snappy texture at room temperature. However, it is a very tricky process, as you need to pay close attention to the temperature of the chocolate. If you don’t have a thermometer or don’t feel like tempering your chocolate, though, no worries! You can still follow our recipe – just store your snebolde in the fridge so that they don’t melt!
Making Snebolde
Apart from tempering the chocolate, the recipe itself is super easy to follow. Just roll your marzipan into balls and coat in chocolate, either tempered or untempered. Once the chocolate has set, coat them again in a simple sugar icing. Coat once again in powdered sugar, and voila! You have made snebolde, the most adorable little wintery sweets that will surely put you in the holiday spirit! Check out the specific steps in our recipe below. If you do try it, please let us know in the comments what you think!
Snebolde (Chocolate Marzipan Snowballs)
Ingredients
- 1 portion marzipan using water instead of egg white (or 250g store-bought marzipan)
- 200 grams good quality chocolate (for tempering)
- 250 grams (about 2 cups) powdered sugar
- Water
Instructions
- Make the marzipan. You can make this in advance and store in the fridge wrapped in plastic wrap until ready to use!
- Roll the marzipan into equal sized balls (we made 36). It is up to you on the size here, we like ours to be bite size! Leave the balls out to dry for at least an hour or so as it helps the candy maintain a better texture for longer if they are a little dried out.
- Now you are ready to temper your chocolate! The process can be difficult – we found great directions and advice on this Sugar Geek Show post. If tempering chocolate is too daunting, no worries – just make sure to store the balls in the fridge to prevent them from melting at room temperature.
- We chose to use the seeding method for our chocolate tempering process and followed the directions on the Sugar Geek Show post, briefly summarized here: melt about 2/3 of your chocolate in a double boiler while stirring constantly, making sure to not exceed 110-115 degrees F. Then remove from the heat and add seed chocolate and continuously stir until the chocolate hits about 86-87 degrees F. The chocolate should be tempered if it sets quickly at room temperature, has a snap, and a glossy sheen. You can test this by spreading a small amount of chocolate on a piece of parchment paper and checking on it after a few minutes. If the first test doesn't set, you can wait a little bit and try again. Don’t worry if it doesn’t work out – you can always keep these in the fridge and they will still taste amazing!
- Once your chocolate is tempered, work quickly to cover each of the balls with chocolate.
- You can use a toothpick to set these upright into a piece of foam, or use a skewer to rest them in a tall glass to set so you don't get "feet" on the balls, but we aren't too picky and just set ours down on a piece of parchment paper to set.
- Let the chocolate fully set at room temperature. Once they are set, mix powdered sugar with a bit of water to get an icing – it needs to be not too runny and not too thick which can be tricky!
- Prepare a second bowl with just powdered sugar.
- Dip each ball in the icing to coat and work quickly to transfer to the powdered sugar bowl, trying to cover all sides of the ball. The icing may want to slide off, but if you work quickly it will cover the whole thing! If you find your icing too runny, add more powdered sugar and mix well.
- Repeat for all the marzipan balls. Make more icing or replace the powdered sugar as needed (We like to just make more as we need instead of having leftover!) Let them dry completely at room temperature. You can add more powdered sugar on the exterior as needed. The sugar should harden to form a crunchy outer shell. Store in a container and enjoy!
