Once you start working with sugar, all the rules change. Take today’s project, for example. In the normal practice of food photography, the components of the composition fall into two categories: food and food props. If this photo were a normal food photo, the apples would be the stars, and the bowl would be the prop, albeit a colorful and flashy one. But once I point out that I made the bowl by hand, and not out of glass, but sugar, suddenly the world goes topsy turvy. The dish is the star, and the apples demoted to mere props.

It goes beyond that, though. The hours in which you play with sugar belong to another world, a sunnier, warmer place, a place where magic walks the earth and comes to cook at your side. Colors are brighter. Pots bubble and boil with a constant snap and pop, like thick, syrupy soda on some serious steroids. Things come into real, three-dimensional being, springing as much from an inner wellspring of imagination as from the hot, malleable sugar in your hands.

My goal is to make this brand of magic a little more accessible to the common foodie. To that end, I’m starting off with the easiest techniques that take the least amount of specialized, expensive equipment. The other main advantage of this approach is that I need to relearn how to do it all, so it’s probably best if we don’t all jump in the deep end together just yet. Stick with me and we’ll get to pulled sugar and blown sugar, but don’t worry: just because we’re starting with basics doesn’t mean things are going to be boring.

The first type of sugar I want to show you is Casting Sugar. Casting sugar is used mostly to make bases and supports for showpieces, but it can also be a quick way to form custom shapes. The sugar can be poured into a variety of different forms and molds, many of which you may have tucked away in your kitchen. Anything made out of silicone works wonderfully with sugar, and metal–as long as it’s well greased–does as well. I’ve used cake rings and frames, cookie cutters, silicone muffin pans and petit four molds, aluminum foil and even granulated sugar to make different shapes with different textures. Once you learn the technique, you’ll look at everything with new eyes, wondering what would happen if you poured sugar into it.

Before we begin, a reminder: boiling and melted sugar is very, very hot! Efficiency and awareness are essential to having a good sugar work experience, uninterrupted by accidents. Have a good block of time so that you aren’t rushed, and make sure to get all of your equipment and materials in order before you start and keep them in order as you work. And be careful, please!

That said, don’t be afraid of working with sugar! That’s a common but unnecessary reaction. Be cautious, but not fearful. If you’re careful, you’ll be fine. I have yet to burn myself working with sugar (knock on wood). And I’m the girl who made her lab partner turn on the Bunsen burner every day in Chemistry because she was afraid of lighting her hair on fire.

This formula is an average of several different casting sugar recipes I have in my books and notes. In general, the baker’s percentages are 100% sugar, 40 to 50% water, and 20 to 30% glucose. One book called for a great deal of tartaric acid solution to be added. We’ll discuss the use of tartaric acid in sugar at a later date, but for now I’ll just say that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put it in casting sugar, so I went with the general consensus and left it out.

The next sugar formula I share with you will not have glucose in it, so keep an eye out for my next sugar post if you can’t get your hands on glucose any time soon. I bought mine at a local cake decorating supply shop. You can also buy small tubs of it at any craft store that sells Wilton cake decorating supplies, or you can buy better quality stuff online, which is what I plan to do in the next week or so.

Equipment

(More information about sugar work equipment)

• A kitchen scale
• A good, heavy, medium-to-large saucepan, preferably copper (I use one with a layer of copper in the bottom)
• A small, fine-meshed strainer
• A natural bristle pastry brush in a glass of warm water
• A candy thermometer, digital is better but glass also works, as long as whichever one you use is accurate

Ingredients

1 kg high quality granulated sugar
500 g cold water
250 g glucose
food coloring (powder or paste), dissolved in a very small amount water or vodka

Method

Before you begin, you want to make sure your saucepan is as clean as possible. Any impurities on the pan or in the sugar can cause sugar crystals to form–one of the two deadly enemies of sugar work, along with humidity. The best way to make sure your pan is totally clean is to scrub it with kosher salt and the juice from half of a lemon, which has the fantastic side effect of leaving you with a very shiny saucepan. Rinse very well after scrubbing.

Once your pan is spot- and speckless, combine the sugar and the cold water. Mix it together with your fingers. That way, you can feel when it’s all evenly mixed. Next, wash down any stray sugar crystals that have climbed up the side of the pan by dipping your fingers under running water and wetting down the sides of the pan. Once again, you’ll be able to feel what’s going on and be sure that you’ve gotten all of the crystals.

Start the sugar over a medium flame, and increase the heat later. Cooking sugar is tricky to do just right. I’m very out of practice, so mine isn’t turning out quite perfectly at the moment, but I’m getting better at it again already. One concern is the amount of time it takes to cook the sugar from start to finish. Too short a cooking time and you’ll end up with brittle sugar. To long a time and the sugar will melt too completely and won’t hold its shape. You want to aim for twenty minutes from start to finish, although anything from 12 to 30 minutes will work, though not ideally.

As the pan heats up, the sugar will slowly dissolve in the water, moving in shimmery, opalescent waves beneath the surface. During this time, just leave it to heat up on its own.

When the sugar first starts to boil, the bubbles will be small, quick, and snappy.

At this point, turn off the heat (or take the pan off of the heat if you don’t have a gas range) and skim any foam or impurities off of the top of the sugar. I was surprised that mine wasn’t too bad at all. A good thing, except it didn’t make for a very instructional photo.

Add the glucose and turn up the heat, higher this time.

This is the point at which you have to really start worrying about crystal formation. You have two options for washing down the sides of the pan, now that’s it’s much too hot to do it with your fingers. The most common technique is to use a pastry brush dipped in water.

Another option is to cover the pan with a lid, but leave it cracked open so that the steam flows up the sides and washes down the crystals without your help. I read somewhere, though, that you have to be careful with this method because it can slow down the cooking process by trapping steam in and keeping the temperature from rising as soon as it normally would, so keep your eye on your cooking time.

I like to do both: wipe down the pan with the brush, then cover it with the lid while I wait to hear it hit soft ball stage. One of the huge benefits of practicing sugar work on a regular basis is learning to tell what stage the sugar is at by sight and sound, a useful skill if you ever make things like caramel, chocolate mousse and Swiss meringue. Below soft ball, the tiny bubbles are fast and have that snappy popping sound I described before. At soft ball, they become increasingly slow and large, and the bubbling loses the “snappiness”. Once I hear the shift, I take the lid off and wash down the sides of the pan with the brush again.

You’ll want to start monitoring the temperature now. Our ultimate destination is 315°F, and after the slow climb to the 240°F range, the temperature will now rise much faster. This is when it’s nice to have a digital thermometer with a temperature alarm set for five degrees below your target temperature, but for some reason I don’t really mind watching boiling pots as long as it’s sugar that’s boiling in them. More important is to have an accurate thermometer, because differences of just two or three degrees can cause more trouble than you’d think.

The bubbles will gradually get slower and larger, but your main gauge of where you are in the process at this point will be your thermometer. Now it’s time to think about how you want to color your sugar. If you want to make it all one color, you can add the coloring about ten or fifteen degrees before the sugar is done and shake the pan to incorporate it. Otherwise, you can add the coloring at the end if you want different shades or a marbled effect. One piece of advice that I (re)learned through experience today: if you want to divide the sugar up to make it a few different colors, don’t pour it into cold pans or containers. Mine cooled off far too quickly, which made coloring and pouring it a real pain and sabotaged some of the plans I had.

First, as a sort of warm up, I did a couple simple shapes using large copper Easter cookie cutters I’d oiled with canola oil and set down on a Silpat laid over a marble cutting board.

This chick turned out not to be the best choice. See how narrow the connection between its body and its foot is?

Now see how little sugar I was able to get through the gap into the foot. If I had been pouring from pan with a little pour spout, I might have been able to guide the sugar in there better.

Aluminum foil is one of my favorite ways to give cast sugar some life and texture. Any pattern you give to the foil will form on the underside of the sugar. Make sure to use it shiny-side up for the best, smoothest patterns. If you oil the foil, it comes away easily once the sugar has cooled, but if the sugar is meant to be the base of a showpiece or something similar, you can also leave the foil on, reflecting even more light back through the sugar. This is a great technique for making blue-green marbled sugar look like water, as I did in my dolphin showpiece.

Cake rings–two or three inch bottomless metal rings used in professional bakeshops–are really useful for pouring perfectly round shapes, whether straight onto a Silpat or oiled marble, or onto oiled aluminum foil like I’m doing here. Unfortunately, I don’t own any cake rings myself (something I’ve wanted to fix for years), but I do have a nine-inch springform pan. I used it without it’s bottom, well-oiled both opened and closed in case some of the sugar leaked through at the place where the ring opens and closes, and turned upside down because the sides were straighter at the top than the bottom, where the base notches in. If you don’t have a springform pan, you can just pour a round shape free form and call it an artisan bowl.

Before the sugar was done cooking, I had my aluminum foil crumpled, straightened out and brushed down thoroughly with oil, and my springform ring oiled, closed and pressed down into the foil, which I then folded up around the outside. I colored some of the sugar yellow and some red, then poured them both into the center of the ring and let the sugar spread out to the edges. Using two colors gives the sugar even more life and movement.

Next, I let the sugar cool until it held its shape, but I was still able to easily bend and form it.

I released the springform pan and carefully pried it away from the edge of the sugar in the few places that were still trying to hold onto it, more from heat than from a lack of enough oil.

I took the shape, foil and all, and set it on top of a shallow soup bowl with a wide rim (you’ll be able to see it better a few photos down).

Then I used my fingers to press the center down into the shape of the bowl, being careful not to press too hard too fast or burn my fingers.

Once the sugar was more or less cool and holding its shape on its own, I turned the bowl upside down and set the sugar bowl upside down on top of it. Then I peeled back the foil slowly.

I was very careful to oil my foil well (I’ve neglected to do that well enough in the past), but I still had a few places where the foil stuck on the first pass.

Fortunately, all of those little pieces came off easily for me. (It may have helped that my sugar wasn’t entirely cooled yet.) If yours don’t, you can try to get them off by chipping away at them with a paring knife.

Because my sugar bowl was still a little warm, I turned it and the real bowl back right side up and let it cool supported until it got to room temperature.

So, there you have it: a fully-functional serving bowl made entirely out of sugar. You just wouldn’t want to put anything wet in it. Unless, of course, you wanted to freak your guests out with a melting, dissolving bowl on the buffet table. In which case, send me photos!

Seriously, though, you don’t even have to stick to fruit bowls. You can make all sorts of cool serving bowls and plates and even cake pedestals from sugar. I’ll hopefully be showing you some other options along those lines in the near future.

Here’s the bottom of the bowl, so you can see the texture–

Wait…

What is that person doing???

Oh no, stop stop stop!!!!

Aaahhhh! Who on earth would do such a thing? I spent a couple hours making that bowl! And I was going to take more photos! And…

Huh, I think that’s my hand holding the murder weapon, actually.

Why would I commit such a senseless act of violence against my beloved sugar bowl? Because this is actually another sugar technique, and I’ve sacrificed my little creation in the name of education. (You didn’t know you were going to get to learn even more today, did you?) In Sucre d’art, l’envers du décor (Sugarworks, Behind the Scenes) by Stéphane Glacier, it’s called Sparkling Sugar. The method is much the same as what we’ve just done, only you can let the sugar cool flat before breaking it. Once the sugar is totally cool, give it one good tap with something heavy like a sturdy pair of kitchen shears. Try to crack it in just one stroke to avoid shattering it into little unattractive bits. The sugar can then be used to give depth and dimension to showpieces, hiding supports or just filling out empty areas in the composition. You can hit the pieces with the flame of a blow torch to make them even more translucent and shiny.

But now that my bowl is gone, where am I going to keep those apples? I can’t just leave them on the counter or the cutting board. They’ve already experienced the opulence of living in a handmade sugar bowl!

Well, maybe if I take some scraps and melt them down in a Pyrex measuring cup in the microwave…thirty seconds at a time until the sugar is pourable again…use some granulated sugar as a dam to keep the base thick, I can put this here…

…and this here…

…and these here…

…and then hold everything in place until things cool down…

…and now my apples can have their very own “showpiece” to hang out on. Hey, it’s a more stylish address than the cutting board!

And that’s the final sugar lesson I want to leave you with for today: if you work with sugar, play with it. Things are going to go wrong. Pieces will break, shapes won’t turn out how you were imagining them, colors will mix into shades you never dreamed of. But the true art of it all is rolling with the punches. At each and every moment, think about what you can do with what you have, and if you’re creative about it, you might even like the end product than what you set out to make.

If you do try this out, take pictures and show me! I’d love to link to anything inspired by these lessons.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work Equipment
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations

I’m one of those people who everyone should be jealous of because I have the good fortune to have in-laws that I really, truly love having in my life. My mother-in-law in particular is an enthusiastic supporter of the blog and sent a request for a blog-worthy contribution for Easter through the contact form on the website. I was very excited about that because it was the first message I got that way! Her request got me thinking about Easter and what I could make. I wanted to do something different, and because I can’t resist a food pun once I’ve thought of it, the Cadbury Creme Brul’egg was born.

I bought both normal and mini Cadbury Creme Eggs at the store on Saturday. I also spotted these chicken-footed egg cups at Whole Foods and picked them up because they were oven safe and went with the eggy theme so well. Each of the egg cups got one mini egg, and I experimented with one large egg in two of the four ounce ramekins and three mini ones in the other two.

The absolute best creme brulee recipe I’ve found comes from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking, so I pulled out my copy of the book and scaled the recipe down by a third to fit the combined volume of the ramekins and egg cups. Cream, sugar and a vanilla bean rose to a simmer together, and then steeped for 15 minutes. Rather than whisking the cream into the egg yolks by hand at that point, I always pour the hot cream in while running the whip attachment on my Kitchen Aid at a very low speed. Try to avoid whipping any more air into the eggs than necessary, because the air will show up as unattractive bubbles on top of the custard.

Once the cream and egg are mixed together, I strained the mixture into a large measuring cup and poured it carefully up to the rim of each egg cup and ramekin.

You probably will end up with a few bubbles on the surface of the custard, even if you carefully whisk by hand. Any ridges of custard on the surface will brown when you are melting the sugar on top before serving, so the best thing to do is to get your blow torch out early and carefully pop the bubbles with a quick brush of a low flame across the top. Be extremely careful to avoid any places where the chocolate is peeking up above the surface. Chocolate scorches at a very low temperature and can’t handle the heat of the torch.

See how the bubbles disappear nicely?

At this point, I filled the baking dish holding the ramekins with boiling water, about two-thirds of the way up their sides, covered the top tightly with foil to keep the tops from overcooking and put the whole thing in a 300 degree oven for 40 minutes. When they came out, I discovered that it may not have been the best idea to mix the egg cups and the ramekins in the same dish. The egg cups are taller, so they tented the foil above the rims of the ramekins and allowed condensation to form above and then pool on the tops of the larger custards. Luckily, the damage was not too bad, but in the future I’d use two smaller baking dishes.

Once the custards are set–they still wiggle, but they wiggle as one mass–I took the baking dish out of the oven. This is a dangerous moment, with a heavy load of boiling water sloshing about, so I always remind myself of something my chef once told me when I was pulling a full sheet pan of boiling water out of an eye-level oven: water can be mopped up, but skin can’t be unburned. You can always remove the ramekins from the pan while it’s still in the oven (use silicone baking mitts and, once again, be careful) and then move the water when it’s cool. When the ramekins are cool enough to handle, I put them on a baking rack until they get down to room temperature, then stash them away in the fridge to chill for at least two hours before serving.

While I was waiting for the ramekins to do their thing in the fridge, I melted the last bit of yellow sugar from the Battlestar Galactica cupcakes in the microwave and used it to make a couple of cast sugar chicks. This is one of the first sugar tutorials I plan to do, but the basic technique is, well, basic: oil a cookie cutter, set it on top of a Silpat and pour just enough molten sugar in to fill in the shape. I had to slide the cookie cutter around a bit to get sugar into the beaks and tails, but otherwise it was as easy as that. I added a bit of sugar at the bottom of each one to stick down into the creme brulee, and then swirled what was left of the melted sugar around to make some more random decorations.

The key to a good, even caramelized creme brulee top is a good, even layer of sugar. When I’m doing small ones, I like to use this tea strainer to dust my sugar over the top. (For large, multi-person creme brulees, I spread the sugar around with a small offset spatula.) If you’re feeling especially OCD, it also helps to tilt the ramekin around to be sure no custard is peeking through, waiting to get singed. For a neater appearance, wipe the sugar off of the rim with a paper towel before burning the top.

My strategy for brulee-ing my cremes is to keep the flame low and keep it moving. I like to get the whole surface partially melted before I start trying for color. Once I get a little caramel action going, I sprinkle another light layer of sugar over it all and then proceed until everything’s nice and golden.

This first way of finishing the presentation was Chris’ idea. He thought it would be cool to “crack” a Cadbury Creme Egg over the top and brulee the sugary “white” and “yolk”. The filling caramelized pretty nicely, but I found it hard to avoid scorching the chocolate shell. I cut away the blackened bits I could see, but Chris–who wanted to eat the one he’d inspired–still got a burnt piece of chocolate. Maybe if I’d been a little more careful it would have worked.

Here’s another one of the large ones with one of those random sugar decorations I mentioned earlier. I pressed it down into the custard immediately after torching the top and held it in place for a moment while the newly caramelized sugar cooled around it. I was impressed at how well the sugar decorations stayed upright.

Here’s one of the egg cups with a sugar chick and a mini egg. I liked the splash of color that serving one of the candies in its wrapper added.

So, you ask, how did they taste?

Well, they were extraordinarily rich. Creme brulee and creme eggs kinda added up to guilty pleasure overload. I almost always put something in my creme brulee, but I realized that what I usually add are things like berries, which cut the sweetness and the heavy creaminess of the custard. The creme egg, on the other hand, intensified that. But they weren’t bad, either. If you love Cadbury Creme Eggs and have nothing against sugar, this might be just the Easter treat for you. I noticed that the ones with just the one large egg were more successful than the ones with all the little eggs in them.

If I were to make these again, I might try replacing the sugar in the recipe with melting a few creme eggs straight into the cream at the beginning, and then “cracking” one on top when I served it. However, I think I’ll be looking for a different dessert to bring over on Easter. Ooo…what about Peeps Suzette?!

Hmm…maybe I’d better stay away from punny foods for awhile.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Sugar Work Equipment
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations

Keep in mind that you don’t need all of this stuff to get started in the wonderful world of sugar! I’m planning on showing as many things as I can think of that require little or no specialized equipment besides a candy thermometer. Most of this equipment is only necessary for pulled and blown sugar. While those are sort of the main attractions of sugar work for many people, they aren’t the only thing you can do with it.

Here is more or less how I’ve been setting my equipment up in this kitchen. Fortunately, I have a nice tall space in the center of our long counter where the side-by-side “vintage” oven and range used to be. (I don’t miss them at all!) Center stage is my sugar warming box. Mine is homemade by the chef I learned to do sugar from. Compare it to a commercially-produced version. Professional sugar equipment is expensive. For the most part, I recommend you make or improvise any of it that you can. Part of the fun of doing sugar or chocolate work is taking creative trips to the hardware store! I managed to find a blog post written by someone who made his own sugar warming box.

The acrylic box stores in two parts: the sides connect to the back with with acrylic hinges, and the top has pieces that run along either side of each of the side pieces to keep it in place. I take the extra step of using clear packing tape to make sure nothing is going to move in the middle of my work. The top of the box has a slot running from back to front which the narrow plug of the cord from the heat lamp fits through.

Here it is with the heat lamp on. It’s very bright and very hot, and you work right up in front of it. I always feel like I’ve been lying out in the sun for an hour after I’m done! The bulb hangs above a warming platform, which in this case is a Silpat nailed over a wooden frame. As the bulb heats the space below it, the warming box keeps the heat in, and the platform traps heat beneath it, helping to warm the sugar from both above and below.

The heat lamp is adjustable thanks to a small clamp that I attach to the cord above the top of the box. It’s very important to be able to not only keep the sugar warm, but to be able to adjust the amount of heat you’re bathing it in by lowering and raising the lamp.

Here I’ve lowered the lamp all the way to remelt some leftovers from the last time I played around with sugar. You have to be careful because it will melt all the way if you leave the lamp down there too long.

Because we have granite counter tops, I don’t want to work with anything so hot directly on top of them. I use a large wooden cutting board from Ikea to shield the counters beneath the warming box. It has a downward lip in front and an upward lip in the back, which are great for keeping everything where it’s supposed to be. I also have a butcher block and a marble slab beneath the Silpats I have set up on either side to pour hot sugar onto or work with pieces that are in progress.

Here’s some of the other equipment I use: a good pair of kitchen shears with all-metal blades; a sugar pump (more on that in a moment); disposable plastic condiment cups for mixing food color with water to add to the sugar; a small, very fine strainer for skimming impurities off of cooking sugar; a paring knife for shaping blown sugar; a natural bristle pastry brush to wash down the sides of the pot while cooking the sugar to avoid crystallization and a candy thermometer (I would much prefer to use a digital candy thermometer, but I haven’t been able to find any of the three I own since the kitchen remodel).

In the back of the photo, you can see an overflowing box of food service-grade gloves. These are nitrile gloves, which we’re trying out because that’s all that Costco had, but I’m going to go back to latex because the nitrile seems more brittle and prone to break than latex during contact with the hot sugar. Also, I have a number of silicone molds, which are great for using up extra sugar by pouring it into them and letting the sugar cool in that shape.

The sugar pump is the one thing that I splurged on and got the very best. Matfer’s sugar pump is the best one I know of, and that’s what I got as a Christmas or birthday present back when I was really into learning the craft. Matfer also makes an “economy” sugar pump, as does Paderno World Cuisine. I felt the more expensive one was worth it, but if I had to chose between having a sugar pump or not having a sugar pump, I’d go economy, but I’d make sure to get a one with a metal tip on the end if I could for the sake of being able to easily attach sugar to it.

The good news is that you can do blown sugar without a sugar pump at all. All you need is a foot of very thin copper pipe, like this, except it’s a lot cheaper if you just buy your copper pipe at the hardware store. It takes a little lung power to do it, but I did make all of the bubbles for the top of the wedding cake in my last post with just a copper pipe.

Another indispensable tool for any foodie’s kitchen is a blow torch. Don’t spend money on the wimpy little “culinary” or creme brulee torches. Get yourself down to the hardware store and get yourself a big-ass plumbing torch. I have both the skinnier, taller variety and the shorter, squatter one you see here. The reason the stout one is particularly good for sugar because it’s more stable when lit and left sitting on the counter while you work with both hands on a sugar flower. Blow torches are used all the time with sugar, for attaching pieces to each other, attaching sugar to a sugar pump, or bringing out a translucent surface on a piece of cast sugar, among many other things.

You will need a good, medium-sized sauce pan, preferably with a nice, heavy bottom, copper if you have it or can afford it. A kitchen scale is needed to measure out the proper quantities of sugar, water and (sometimes) glucose. A few Silpats are always useful, and I love having an extra large Silpat, not only for having plenty of room for the hot sugar to spread out on, but also for kneading and rolling out dough, sifting flour, etc. If you want to do blown sugar, a free-standing pet hair dryer is great for cooling your blown pieces under. If you don’t cool them quickly and evenly, they will deform thanks to gravity.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations

First, a comparison. This was the first showpiece I ever made:

And this is the one I made nine months later for my graduation portfolio review and reception:

The sugar technique on my cupcakes last week, as cute as I think they turned out, falls slightly closer to the first showpiece than the last on my ability spectrum, so I have some ground to make up.

In my defense, that first showpiece was not designed by me in any way, shape, or form, but the execution was all me (except for the ribbons, which look pretty good but were made by the instructor). Maybe it was a good thing that I really didn’t like the design or the colors, because at the time it took my mind off of how frustrated I was that I couldn’t make the sugar do what I wanted it to.

This was back during my first quarter of pastry school. Our chef instructor for that term offered three-day showpiece workshops out of his home, and I was really excited to take the chocolate one. He was also offering a sugar work workshop. I wasn’t sure that I was that interested in it, but Chris and I decided that I shouldn’t miss the opportunity to learn the skill, so I signed up for both the sugar and chocolate classes.

The sugar workshop came first. I went into it really looking forward to the next workshop when I’d get to work with chocolate, but sugar…well, either you love working with it or you don’t, and from what I’ve seen, your first impression is the one that sticks. If you’re going to bond with the sugar, it’s love at first sight. Or first pull, in this case. I think you have to have a certain type of personality, or maybe just naturally cold hands.

Whatever it was, I had it. I loved the way it moved, from a hot, fast pour to the slow stretches that folded layers of reflective sheen beneath its colorful surface. I loved the heat on my face, the slight sunburn I’d walk away with at the end of the day. I was frustrated with trying to pull petals for the simple flowers on that first showpiece, but on the second day, while making roses for our second showpiece of the workshop, it clicked.

This piece combines a number of different techniques. The peach on the left is blown sugar that was then painted and dusted with cornstarch to simulate peach fuzz, the pear is pressed sugar formed and dried in a silicone mold, and the log, leaves and roses are pulled sugar. The base is cast sugar that was poured into a depression in a container of regular granulated sugar to achieve the crystalline outer surface.

By this time, I was really enjoying myself. The next showpiece we did was a giant flower:

The petals are pastillage (which is vaguely like rolled fondant, but dries extremely hard), the stamens are tiny strings of pulled sugar that were trimmed and fused together, the base is a round of pressed sugar, the stem is sugar molded in a clear vinyl pipe that was cut away to remove it. It’s held up by more pieces of cast sugar that we made at the same time as the base for the previous piece. I’m not as much of a fan of working with pastillage as I am of sugar–it’s a pain to work with because it dries out so quickly–but I liked the way it looked on this piece.

This was the final piece we made that weekend, a blown sugar swan. (Ignore its beak…I couldn’t make it not look wonky.) That time, I made the ribbons myself.

The chef had equipment available to purchase. I was hooked, so a sugar station (an acrylic enclosure that suspends an adjustable heat lamp over a silicone mat pulled tight around a wooden frame like a painter’s canvas) came home with me. I started playing around with some of the techniques at home.

This is a little piece I made at home for my mother-in-law’s Mother’s Day present. She still has it behind the glass in her china cabinet, and I’m shocked at how well it’s held up over the years.

Learning how to work with sugar at the beginning of my pastry school experience was often useful to me in class, especially on this first cake I did for the wedding cake unit during our third quarter. I made the sugar bubbles on top and brought them in, since I didn’t want to lug all of my equipment to school. I wish I’d had time to make enough bubbles to decorate the lower tiers of the cake, especially considering I couldn’t get the icing color to match the sugar color thanks to the yellow undertone. That’s what you get when you want real butter in your buttercream.

During our last quarter in pastry school, we finally learned how to do some basic sugar work as part of the coursework. Fortunately, I was already ahead of the game thanks to the sugar workshop. This is the prettiest apple I’ve ever made. And this photo was taken about a minute before I dropped it. As a pastry cook or cake decorator, you have to get used to watching your hard work and artistry be destroyed and devoured in minutes. Sugar takes that to a completely different level, especially when it suddenly shatters into a million pieces for no apparent reason.

While everyone else was learning how to do sugar for the first time and trying to blow blobs of sugar into the fruit we were supposed to make, I finished early and messed around with extra sugar.

Still just messing around with scraps.

Later that quarter, we began to prepare for Portfolio, which was technically our big final project/portfolio review but mostly just a crowded pre-graduation reception for our friends and family. I spent months and months on my chocolate showpiece (another story for another time) and made what I thought was a very pretty little two-tiered cake, but what I got hundreds of compliments on was my sugar showpiece that I banged out over the course of three nights right before Portfolio.

For this showpiece, I was following directions from Sucre d’art, l’envers du décor (Sugarworks, Behind the Scenes) by Stéphane Glacier. This is a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in sugar decorations and showpieces. I have a few other professional books on the subject, but they’re all on the older, outdated side. This book shows gorgeous, modern, vivid, sleek work. Having made one of the showpieces from it, I can vouch for the directions (and their translation into English) being clear enough to follow. Even without all the information, the photos in the book were worth the price to me.

So, here is the first dolphin I used on the showpiece. (I’m aware that anatomically it’s not quite a dolphin, as Chris pointed out to me long ago. I was following directions, and that’s what it’s called in the book.) I made six dolphins in total, and this one won the beauty contest. I liked it’s personality, and it had the nicest curve to its body of all of them.

I thought the dolphins would be much more difficult to make than they were. The dolphin’s mouth, for example, is part of the blown sugar piece rather than just stuck on later. The line across where his eyes would be had to be marked in with a paring knife to control the shape as it expanded and cooled. But as I was working on them, the techniques really didn’t seem that hard at all, which means I don’t think I’d pushed myself far enough before that point. Or after that, since this was the last time I did anything substantial with sugar until last week.

Here I am airbrushing the color onto the dolphin. This is one of the few pictures I have of myself from pastry school, mostly because I thought this part was so cool that I needed to have a photo of it and planned ahead.

And here is the whole thing, finished and ready to be moved into place for the big day. Notice the curve of the dolphin’s body, the way it seems to ride the wave…

A moment after I took this photo, I picked the showpiece up and moved it to the next table over. As I set it down, very carefully, the dolphin shattered.

I nearly cried.

Fortunately, I had other dolphins, but none of them were anywhere close to the first one.

I want to pan down for a moment and focus on something other than the dolphin, because the crashing waves were very fun to make and very cool to look at. See the thin pieces of sugar, how they have bubbles in them? They’re made by shaking hot sugar down a piece of silicone paper (a piece of parchment paper that’s covered in silicone). Very easy to do, but very effective. There are also huge chunks of broken poured sugar holding the whole thing up and giving it a watery sort of depth. You can’t see it in this picture, but if you look up above at the top left of the big circle, you’ll notice that the colors even swirled in the same direction as the wave was supposed to be moving. I was quite proud of that.

At least the second dolphin looked pretty playful, as if he was leaping and twisting, about to dive back under the waves. In the end, I liked him too, even if he wasn’t the original. He did manage to stay intact through Portfolio, which is more than I can say for the first one.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work Equipment
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations