I tried my hand at sugar work today. I've seen it all the time on Food Network Challenge and documentaries about the International Chocoloate Showdown or whatever it is called. It looks very hard. I don't even bake cakes, much less work with sugar in a sculpting capacity. But one day when I was researching something about sugar for some reason, I don't even remember what, I came across a few websites where people were talking about how to do simple, beginner sugar work that didn't look too complicated. This one, for example, seemed like a doable project. Also, pretty.
What the heck, right? It's only a couple of cups of sugar. I stuck two straws to my counter and laid a ton of wax paper on the floor. Heated the sugar, flicked the fork around a bit, and hey... what do you know? I had spun sugar! After I had plenty, I poured the remaining melted sugar into a bowl of ice, which I'd seen somebody do on Ace of Cakes to make a coral reef. When I was done with that nonsense, which didn't quite look like a coral reef, by the way, I returned to my spun sugar. I needed to gently fold it so it resembled a little nest. Well, it was too cold and brittle by this point and mostly broke up in my hands. Boo! I had waited too long. I didn't realize when the directions said to let it cool a little and then form it that they meant more like 5 seconds and not 5 minutes. Lesson learned.
I tried to salvage what I had and after some fiddling I did end up with sparkly little discs that I served with my granita for dessert tonite. And, several oddly-shaped pieces of amber-colored hard sugar that I am telling Dan is candy.
Despite the shenanigans I'd say my foray into sugar work was actually a minor success. I did get the sugar to the right consistency for the project, after all, and for my first time nothing tragic or horrible happened. I'm going to give this another try for sure. I even have a shiny new Silpat for this very thing.
Happy eating!
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