sugar sugar

For the last week (since our Snow Day, in fact) my class has been playing around with sugar. Poured, pulled, blown, pressed, spread over denatured alcohol or doctored with royal icing and agitated until it souffles to twice its size - we've done it all. On Monday and Tuesday we got to pull it all together, working in groups to create showpieces utilizing the various techniques.

Monday's theme was "great art." Our group was working from a painting by a Brazilian artist from the early 20th century. Her bright color palette and bold, graphic design lent themselves well to translation in sugar. After a day of pulling, pouring, and blowing our sugar, we sweated through the very delicate process of assembling the completed pieces. There were a few minior mishaps - a broken cactus arm here, a crumbling rock there - but nothing some Isomalt (a "fake" sugar that melts more quickly and sets faster and harder than real sugar) and airbrushed food color couldn't fix. Here's the finished product - we were all pretty happy with the result!

Tuesday's theme was "Spring." The classroom was full of beautiful pastel flowers and charming butterflies and vernal grasses. In our corner, however, we took a slightly different tack, adopting "spring break" as our focus. This showpiece was a little trickier to design and execute since Monday's, because it had to be beautiful AND functional. Our design was required to include two platforms that would support 6" cakes. Our supports were made out of pressed sugar, made almost like a sand castle, but with wet sugar instead of wet sand. This technique turned out to be a great choice, because we were able to use the leftovers to decorate the finished showpiece.

The focal point of the show piece was a beautiful pulled sugar wave, but the real genius of it was in all the charming details - the plane pulling the sign, the little shark fins poking out of the wave, the tiny life preservers, colorful pulled sugar surfboards, miniature beer bottles poking out of the "sand." We also got to try some fun new techniques - the base was made by pouring molten sugar onto a sheet pan filled with granulated sugar. This gave us a really cool crystallized surface, perfect for our "beach," and pouring natural and blue sugars next to each other gave a great depth effect for the "shoreline." Hopefully you can tell we had a lot of fun making this!