Early fall through Christmas, Beate Christoph stirs up extra sales for a South Hill business that transforms marzipan—a mixture of almond paste and sugars—into miniature snowmen, fruits, and Santas, among other holiday treats.

Christoph owns home-based Spokane business Marzipan Confections, which sells mostly wholesale to candy gift stores and specialty food markets in Spokane and across the U.S. Year-round, she makes the soft dough-like marzipan into colorful shapes of vegetables, fruits, leaves, seasonal characters, animals, school mascots, and more.

However, September to December is her busiest time, when Christoph creates up to 25,000 individual marzipan treats for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year's celebrations.

Marzipan Confections has some retail sales through its website, but about 90 percent of its business is wholesale to stores, such as Huckleberry's Natural Market and Spokandy Inc. in Spokane.

Among the popular seasonal products she crafts are bright pink marzipan pigs in which Christoph inserts a paper gold coin, a tradition that harkens back to her German heritage. She was born in Germany, and at age 3, she and her family moved to the United States.

"We always had marzipan at Christmas time," Christoph says. "One of the traditional pieces given were the pigs with the little gold paper coins, like a piggy bank, at Christmas and New Year's, as something that represented good luck and prosperity for the coming year."

For Thanksgiving gifts, Christoph makes a fall assortment of leaves and seasonal items. She also creates and packages small gift boxes with a few miniature marzipan items for stores to stock. In the stores, Christoph says the individual pieces of Marzipan Confections typically sell for $1.99 for a one-ounce size, and around $8 for a gift box with an assortment of smaller pieces.

The larger individual Santas and snowmen usually sell for around $5 to $6 each, she says.

She adds, "Marzipan comes from a tradition of Christmas, Easter, and the holidays. That's what people associate marzipan with, and it's my busiest time of the year. All the European countries have different traditions with marzipan. Italians do a lot of fruits and vegetables—big ones."

After moving to the U.S., Christoph grew up in Chicago, later completing a degree in interior design in Savannah, Ga. She then worked in the design field in Seattle, where she met her husband, Steve Dodroe, and they subsequently moved to Spokane. About nine years ago, when their son had started school, Christoph bought the recipes and assets of a Spokane-based marzipan operation run by a married couple, Joe and Edith Nendl.

She and her husband built a commercial-grade kitchen in the basement of their home, where Christoph makes the no-bake confections. In the business's kitchen space, she works on large tables with marble countertops. It also has a large commercial mixer she purchased from the Nendls.

"It's an old Hobart mixer, probably 60 years old," Christoph says. "I have a lot of things that are original equipment from the old country, and recipes."

The marzipan doesn't require baking. Christoph says she uses high-quality almond paste she buys from a California distributor and adds different types of sugars. To form the pieces, she uses molds or shapes them by hand and applies tools for tiny details.

She then paints the figures with food coloring using an airbrush technique, and as a final touch, sprays a thin coating of cocoa butter to keep the pieces moist.

Christoph recently began making a new line of marzipan treats that are lightly toasted for a caramelized look, without any food coloring added, created by applying heat to the tops of the confections from the flame of a small kitchen blow torch tool.

She says the light browning of the marzipan brings out details and design features.

"I think it adds to the flavor and gives it a little toasted nuttiness," Christoph says, adding, "I'm introducing that as a new product this year. I've been testing it out at Huckleberry's, and it's had a good response."

During the holidays, Christoph also stocks products at two other Spokane businesses, Egger's Better Meats and Spokandy Inc. She says the Rosauers store in Spokane Valley also carries the marzipan products in its bakery case.

She adds, "Huckleberry's is my main client. They carry my marzipan year-round. With Egger's, I seasonally stock them for major holidays. Spokandy just buys at Christmas, and they carry just fruit."

Locally, she delivers to stores but otherwise ships her products to the outlets that sell it. "I ship to the East Coast, California, Oregon, and Seattle," she says. "I sell to a chain of stores called Market of Choice in Oregon, which has eight or nine stores. Each store buys different things."

Christoph says that while the recession resulted in the closure of some small stores in the U.S. that previously bought from Marzipan Confections, enough other new retail outlets have opened and now buy the products, or existing ones have picked them up, to more than offset the losses. As a result, Christoph says Marzipan Confections has grown in the past two years.

"I've been gaining new customers," she says. "In the last year, it's been on an upswing. Last year, I added new customers that were relatively new stores. Usually they're small specialty stores, or confection and chocolate shops. I added maybe 10 new customers this past year."

She says the shoppers who typically buy the Marzipan Confections products include people who remember them growing up, and also others who want to try it for the first time because of how it looks.

"Some people just love the taste of marzipan; it's usually one or the other," Christoph says. "People love it or don't like it, or there are some people who think they don't like it because they've had bad marzipan in the past. It's supposed to be soft when it's fresh, like cookie dough."

She says, "When I package it, I vacuum-pack it so it stays fresh. Others make marzipan with more sugar and not as much almonds. Mine is more of the German marzipan, and some of the commercial marzipan from the East Coast is made with more sugar."

She says she often fills custom orders that help her to come up with new, creative ideas. One example is a cake topper shaped to appear as a zombie bride and groom, as requested for a wedding. She has made special designs for parties and created some original molds for newer shapes.

"I guess just searching the Internet, people find me," she says. "I don't think there are many people who do custom work like I do on this scale."

She adds, "I did some custom work that was a set of a duck and football, and a beaver and football, in little gift boxes," which went to the Market of Choice stores in Oregon. She makes other whimsical characters, such as a frog prince with tiny lips and a crown.

Christoph is the company's only employee, and she sometimes rises early during this busier season to stay on top of production. However, Christoph says she can take time off during the slower summer months.

She says she plans to keep creating marzipan, with a business model at about its current size, which she says is manageable for one person.

She adds, "It's like playing with play dough, and when I make up new a design, that's the fun and creative part."