Alternative to royal/fondant icing on Christmas cake

[NCcreationistDad]

I'm making a Christmas cake, loads of dried fruit and brandy and other gorgeous things.

I'm making a marzipan to cover it.

However I need an alternative to the white sugar paste icing for the top layer. Both my cake and marzipan will be sugar (processed sucrose for the pedants) free and obviously I can't make sugar free royal icing! Any one got any suggestions for an alternative that will work?

So far my thoughts are some kind of chocolate glaze, either white or dark (cocoa butter or coconut oil, mixed with cocoa powder or coconut powder and maple syrup) but I'm not sure they'll go with the taste of all the dried fruit, especially the coconut ones.

Anyone got any other suggestions? I can think about the sugar substitute side of things if you can suggest the type of topping.

And of course I'd like it to be able to keep for 2-3 weeks so if I make it beginning of Dec it lasts until Christmas. I'm starting the cake this week and really hope that keeps without sugar- anyone got any experience of this?

You could cover it in fruits and nuts and glaze in some way? Some people call it a 'jewelled' fruit cake.

Glazed nuts, or glazed nut and dried fruit - but maybe do away with the marzipan?
Or keep the marzipan and just have marzipan a little browned, like a simnel cake?
A mix of marzipan shapes (xmas trees or stars or something) with gold edible glitter ... like that Nigella one

I'd say glazed fruit and nuts would probably be your best bet too. Something like this or this.

The only thing is, you'd have to come up to a sugar alternative for the actual glaze, although if the cake is fully marzipanned, you could probably get away with not glazing the fruit as long as it's properly stored. You generally wouldn't marzipan a jewelled cake though.

Another alternative would be to use the marzipan itself as decoration. You could either cut out festive marzipan shapes and toast them, a bit like the topping for a simnel cake but with a festive theme - like this or colour the marzipan and just use that instead of icing. Marzipan fruits are traditional for Christmas - like this, but you could just as easily do holly, Christmas trees, Santa, reindeer etc.

Oops, cross-posted while previewing my post to make sure the links worked.

That sounds beautiful- the use of the word jewel is good marketing! I'll look into this - thanks

I posted my reply when I only had an answer from susu so big thanks to moonshine and moose too. Lots of lovely click links.

I think marzipan shapes and maybe some sticky glazed fruits in a really tasteful pattern might be the way forward. And since I'm clearly not up to the artistic challenge I can blame the wonky lumps on DD!