Almond Banket Bars Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the difference between marzipan and frangipane? ›

Their purposes and textures, however, are very different, making them unable to be substituted with one another. While marzipan is a thick and sweet icing dough, frangipane is a creamy and lightly-sweetened filling.

Banket is typically prepared using a mixture of flour, eggs, and butter, or puff pastry as its base, then filled with almond paste, and dusted with sugar. Marzipan, an almond paste prepared with almond meal and honey or sugar, is sometimes used as the filling.

The Main Differences

Marzipan is smooth, sweet, and often dyed and molded into shapes. It's also used to cover sweets much like fondant and is sometimes eaten as is. Almond paste, however, is coarser, less sweet, and used as an ingredient or filling for baked goods.

It can be confusing that recipes sometimes use the terms "almond paste" and "marzipan" interchangeably, as they're actually quite different. Almond paste has a coarser texture but is much softer than marzipan, which allows it to be spread as a filling. Unlike marzipan, almond paste holds up in baking.

Frangipane is a classic French filling for cakes, tarts, and pastries. It's made with butter, sugar, eggs, and ground almonds, so it's pretty similar to an almond paste.

Frangipane is one of those classic French pastry preparations, made with a finely ground mixture of half almonds and half sugar. This blend of almonds and sugar is known as TPT (tant pour tant) in French pastry-speak, which translates as "so much X for so much" or equal amounts.

Bonket (Dutch Almond Pastry)

What is a Banquette? A banquette is a seat or bench which is specially designed to fit into a space, typically running along a wall. They are also known as fixed seating, booth seating and bench seating, and are most commonly found in restaurants and cafes.

Also called almond candy dough, marzipan is an agreeable, multi-purpose combo of the first two, with a subtle almond flavor and unmatched malleability. Be sure to try these marzipan cake recipes.

Almond paste is more similar to marzipan than frangipane, but it's still distinctly its own. It's made of the same ingredients as marzipan but it's less sweet and richer in almond flavor. It's a bit more crumbly and coarse-textured and is used in baked goods such as these pignoli cookies.

Can you eat almond paste raw? ›

Many recipes for homemade almond paste call for egg white. Because almond paste is not consumed raw and is always baked at temperatures above 150 degrees F (65 degrees C) where the salmonella bacteria are killed, using egg white is less of a concern in almond paste than in marzipan.

The glory of marzipan is because it holds a shape easily, you can cut out or mold your own figures to decorate holiday pastries. It's also used as a kind of heavy-duty frosting for Christmas cakes because it helps long-keeping cakes (like fruitcakes) retain their moisture instead of going stale.

You can find packaged almond paste in the baking aisle at most grocery stores.

You can put anything in a cinnamon bun, but almond paste is a pretty amazing addition. Just a thin layer adds a nice richness to the dough without adding too much sweetness; unlike marzipan, almond paste has a more concentrated almond flavor that allows you to control the level of sugar in a baked good.

While you might be tempted to think so from the similar-sounding names, not only are they not the same thing, but they're not even the same type of product. Frangipane is a rich, cream-based filling, while marzipan is a thick paste mostly used for decorative purposes.

The German name 'marzipan' has supplanted the original English name 'marchpane. ' Some theorise that it originally comes from the Latin 'martius panis', or 'March bread'. Others cite Arabic, Burmese, or Persian as the language of origin.

What is frangipane? A creamy mixture of ground almonds, butter, sugar and eggs that is sometimes used to fill tarts. Halved stone fruit, such as apricots and plums, can be baked on top to make a delicious dessert.