Day 4: Color

These cute, colorful froggies are from The Swedish Bakery, located in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago.  The bakery is famous for specializing in Swedish coffeecakes, cookies, sweetrolls, toast, petit fours and marzipan cakes. The bright green of the frogs is actually marzipan (a confection consisting primarily of sugar and almond meal).  Though my husband and I live approximately 2 miles from The Swedish Bakery, we had never ventured inside.  Recently, I was watching The Best Thing I Ever Ate on the Food Network and the episode featured all things "nutty".  Ted Allen described the frogs (and marzipan log cake slice) as being his best thing - nutty for the almond flavoring in these bakery treats.  As luck would have it, my husband visited the bakery this week and surprised me with this fun dessert :)

To truly appreciate this work of bakery art, let me indulge you in the details: the frogs have a crunchy cookie crust on bottom, which is hand dipped in dark chocolate.  There is yellow cake hiding underneath the green marzipan which gets a small wedge removed, so they can pipe creamy raspberry filling into the center of the cake.  The red "tongue" is raspberry gel and the eyes are vanilla frosting.  I did feel a tad guilty biting into that adorable smiling face, but it sure was a deeeeeeeeeeeeelightful dessert!