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?