“I remember my first Christmas gift. I was 4 years old,” says Karen Hansen, owner of Copenhagen Pastry, the Danish bakery that now has two storefronts in the Los Angeles area. “It was a marzipan fruit.” Hansen, now 57, is smiling as she tells the story, powdered sugar on her hands, the aroma of baking Linzer tarts saturating the air in her year-old Pasadena shop — Hansen’s first place opened three years ago in Culver City — that functions for many people in this town as a kind of marzipan dealership.
At Copenhagen Pastry, Hansen figures, about 80 percent of the traditional Danish pastries and cookies and cakes she sells contain marzipan, or sugared almond paste, in some form or another. There are the kringles and kranse cakes and Napoleon hats — cookies folded around balls of marzipan and dipped in chocolate that are meant to resemble the French general’s black felt hat, a piece of actual headgear that sold last year at auction for $2.4 million. (Why Napoleon’s hat? Because Denmark and France were allies in the early 19th century. And if you could bake pastries in the shape of a tiny general’s hat, you probably would too.)
Hansen is from Næstved, a town about an hour south of Copenhagen in Denmark, and she grew up baking with her family. Her mother made her own marzipan, stretching the paste with additional powdered sugar to make it go farther, as the almonds were expensive. They still are, in drought-beset California, which gives baking with marzipan a celebratory feel, the blend of tradition and cupboard extravagance aligning with the Christmas decorations in the front of the bakery and the rows of little molded marzipan pigs that Hansen and her bakers have made for the holiday.
If you didn’t grow up on it, marzipan is highly addictive stuff, often loaded into almond croissants or bear claws, secreted inside pastries and cookies, formed into dangerously cute little candies that have been molded into the shapes of fruits or animals. (Marzipan and almond paste are more or less the same thing, although marzipan often is made with significantly more sugar, depending on its manufacturer and purpose.)
And although you can find marzipan in pastries and desserts of many cultures, Northern European countries have a particular fixation with it. Odense marzipan, which is what most people find in grocery stores, has been made in the Danish town of the same name, Hans Christian Andersen’s hometown, since 1909. And if you’ve ever been to the northern German city of Lübeck, you might be forgiven for thinking it’s an enormous pastry shop, rather than a Hanseatic port town, because there are so many shops selling the stuff.
Hansen’s role as marzipan supplier was a circuitous one. It was her brother Peter who first became a baker, although “it was our dream to open a bakery over here” in the country to which Hansen immigrated in 1981. When he was a teenager, Peter worked at night in a bakery in Næstved; then he opened two bakeries in Denmark and, later, baked in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Hansen, on the other hand, moved to Los Angeles, worked for a maid service (“When you’re Danish, you do that”) and then ran a marketing business for photographers for 20 years. And, finally, opened a bakery — although without her brother, who died in his early 30s.
“We wanted to have a very traditional pastry shop,” says Hansen, who credits her success to her customers’ connection to the culture — she just sent out a huge pastry order to a Danish church — and to a newfound interest in Danish cuisine. “Noma has definitely raised awareness,” she says of Rene Redzepi’s celebrated Copenhagen restaurant. People come in to Hansen’s shop, whether for the first time or the hundredth, “and then we just fill them full of samples.” For marzipan junkies, that’s mostly all it takes.
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COPENHAGEN PASTRY NAPOLEON HATS
50 minutes, plus chilling and cooling. Makes 20 cookies.
Cookie dough
2 1/2 cups (300 g) flour
1 1/4 cups plus 1 tablespoon (150 g) powdered sugar
1/2 cup plus 6 tablespoons (1 3/4 sticks, or 200 g) butter, cut into small pieces, at room temperature
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon (66 g) water
1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, or in a large bowl using an electric mixer, mix together the flour and powdered sugar. With the mixer running, start adding the butter cubes and continue mixing until all the butter is added and the mixture has a wet, sand-like consistency.
2. Make an indentation in the middle of mixture and add the egg yolk and water. Mix just until all of the ingredients are combined to form a dough. Form the dough into a flat square and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Chill until the dough is firm, at least 30 minutes.
3. Remove the dough to a lightly floured work surface and roll to a thickness of about 1/8-inch. Use a 3-inch round cutter to cut 20 circles from the dough. Arrange the circles on 2 parchment-lined baking sheets and refrigerate for at least an hour.
ALMOND PASTE
8 ounces (275 g) raw slivered almonds
1/3 cup light agave sweetener
2 teaspoons almond extract
1/2 cup (100 g) sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons (20 g) egg white
1. In the bowl of a food processor, pulse the almonds until they are very finely ground. With the processor running, add the agave and almond extract in a slow stream until the mixture comes together to form a ball. Add the sugar and pulse until it is incorporated, then the egg white. Continue running until the mixture again forms a ball, stopping and scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl once or twice if needed.
2. Refrigerate the paste for at least 30 minutes to cool, then divide the mixture into 20 balls (each using a heaping tablespoon of paste).
NAPOLEON HATS
Almond paste balls
Prepared dough circles
Melted chocolate, for coating
1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Place a ball of almond paste in the center of each dough circle. Fold the cookie dough around the ball and press in three places using your fingers. Bake the cookies until the tops of the balls and edges of the cookies are golden brown.
2. Place the cookies on a rack until they are cool, then dip the bottoms of the cookies in the melted chocolate. Invert the cookies so the chocolate can dry.
Each of 20 cookies, without chocolate coating
Calories 274
Protein 5 g
Carbohydrates 31 g
Fiber 2 g
Fat 15 g
Saturated fat 6 g
Cholesterol 31 mg
Sugar 17 g
Sodium 4 mg
Note: Adapted from a recipe from Copenhagen Pastry.
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