For over 40 years my family has made handmade marzipan candy gift
boxes at Christmas time.  These marzipans are molded, colored, and
painted to look like fruits and vegetables.  A typical box could
contain cherries, bananas, strawberries, tomatoes, potatoes, oranges,
peaches, plums, peas, grapes, apples, pumpkins, or pears.  A
fundamental part of the decoration is the stem.  For pumpkins and
tomatoes we create a thick stem out of green marzipan.  For some
fruits and vegetables we use a whole clove for the stem.  However, for
many of them - the strawberry, cherries, peaches, apples - we've
always used decorative confectionery leaves.

These stems have become increasingly harder and harder to find.  In
fact this year, we almost put off making marzipan altogether because
we could not find a supplier for the leaves.  Until about 15 or 20
years ago, the leaves were plentiful and normally made of a silk leaf
attached to a wooden stem.  The strawberry stem was a multi-pointed
star shaped leaf with a stem through its center, the apple and pear
used a single ovoid shaped leaf with a single stem, and there were
several variations of vine-like grape leafs and serrated edged fruit
leaves.  The wooden stems were ideal because the could be split and
inserted into a paired cherry cluster for a realistic looking cherry
stem.  Lately, what few leaves we can find have been made of plastic -
a poor substitute, but better than nothing.

I am looking for suppliers of these types of leaves, plastic, wooden,
or a combination, for our marzipan.  I need the strawberry leaves and
at least one kind of single stem, oval leaf.  Grape vine leaves or any
other type of similar sized leaf would be great too.  The leaves
should be approximately 3/4" across for the strawberries, and
proportionally sized for the other leaves.  The actual marzipan
candies are on average anywhere from 1" - 1.5" in length or diameter,
so obviously a 2" wide leaf won't work.

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Clarification of Question by mopower-ga on 08 Jan 2003 13:00 PST

Could you be more specific?  Yes, this site does have the strawberry
leaves, but that is the most specific leaf used (i.e., it's only used
strawberries whereas the other leaves can be used on multiple items)
and still leaves me empty handed for the other five or more fruits
that require leaves.

I Googled on "marzipan suppliers".  The quoted phrase returned no
results, and as far as I could tell, the unquoted phrase returned
companies who actually produce marzipan candies themselves, not
confectionery supplies.  Searching for "marzipan supplies" produced
another site: www.kitchencrafts.com which also sells the strawberry
leaves, but no other kind of leaves.

Did you see something more specific that I'm missing?

Greetings, mopower!

Thanks to the assistance of Researcher Leli, I can tell you that you
can obtain edible marzipan leaves from:

Country Kitchen SweetArt
4621 Speedway Drive
Fort Wayne, IN  46825
    phone: 260-482-4835
toll-free: 1-800-497-3927 (orders only please)
      fax: 260-483-4091
   e-mail: cntryktchn@aol.com
http://www.countrykitchensa.com/contactus/contactus.htm

Some of their selection can be viewed on this page:
http://www.countrykitchensa.com/cgi-bin/e8.exe?cat4&67

They also received in stock **just this past week** leaves that
resemble ferns, with the leaf attached to the middle of the stem
(i.e., for carrots).

       Strawberry Leaves (approx. 3/4" to 1" in diameter)
  25-341P   Marzipan Leaves, Strawberry  $2.67 per pkg of  100
  25-341    Marzipan Leaves, Strawberry $21.79 per pkg of 1000

       Fruit Leaves (approx. 1-1/4" in length)
PH-350343P  Peach/Cherry/Apple           $2.90 per pkg of  100
                        Marzipan Leaves
PH-350343   Peach/Cherry/Apple          $26.00 per pkg of 1000
                        Marzipan Leaves

       Carrot Leaves (approx. 1-1/2" in length)
PH-350340P  Marzipan Leaves, Carrot      $2.90 per pkg of  100
PH-350340   Marzipan Leaves, Carrot     $26.00 per pkg of 1000


While I could not find ready-made grape leaves, I did find cutters for
4 different sizes of grape leaves (along with a wide selection of
cutters for other types of leaves) among the marzipan leaf-cutting and
molding tools from JC Cake Supply:
https://secure9.easyspace.com/www.jccakes.com/acatalog/JC_Cake_Supply_Leaf_121.html#aJ100321


Some other resources:

They're not edible, but you can purchase vinyl leaves for carrots,
strawberries, peaches, and cherries from Pfeil and Holing:
http://www.cakedeco.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_main.html?catid=175&sid=9ZPAaE0X85E@4hb

Fabric, foil, and plastic leaves from Winbeckler Enterprises (toward
the bottom of the page:
http://www.winbeckler.com/floral_spraysleaves.asp


Search Strategy

marzipan leaves catalog
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=marzipan+leaves+catalog&btnG=Google+Search


Before Rating my Answer, if you have any questions, please post a
Request for Clarification, and I will be glad to see what I can do for
you.

I hope that this Answer provides you with exactly the information that
you needed!

Regards,

aceresearcher

The Country Kitchen plastic leaves are exactly what I was looking for.
 The edible leaves, while interesting don't quite fit the bill.  Many
many thanks.  I'll be ordering several thousand just in case!

www.winbeckler.com supplies decorative strawberry leaves for marzipan.
Other suppliers can be found on Google under "marzipan suppliers". Do
you accept this as an answer?
Thanks, 
knowitall22-ga