Friday, May 7, 2010

Fun with Sugar

In today's class at school we had the whole class to play around with sugar. Chef demonstrated poured sugar, spun sugar, and caramel cages. Later, we'll have a whole class on sugar and chocolate techniques so this is just a short introduction.

I decided to try to make a bird in a nest. Here are the forms I made from aluminum foil....

and below are the forms, after I poured the sugar in. As you can see, the bird sprung a leak because the form wasn't quite level. I should have held it down until set a little bit.

But, it was easily fixed - as you can see below, I just gave it a whack after it cooled and the excess cracked off.

Below is the bird and his base - glued together with more hot sugar. Notice how his edges are a little sharp and jagged? That's because I made a homemade mold. I took a small torch later and smoothed those out.


Below is the finished bird, sitting in a nest made of spun sugar. The bowl of the nest is more poured sugar, formed by pressing onto an inverted metal bowl after the sugar had set a little but was still flexible. When it finished cooling, it was fairly easy to pop it off the bowl form.



I also did this little drawing below. I poured clear sugar into a round form then put some drops of food coloring in and swirled them with a clean skewer to make my design.


And last, here are a couple of awesome sculptures made by my classmates. Brianna made the beautiful waterlily below, using a spoon as a mold for the petals (smart, eh?) and....
....this last one was made by Kaitlyn. Pretty cool, right?

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