Week 45 Sugar Casting

Sugar is definitely not as much fun as chocolate. Why? Because I get to eat the chocolate at the end of the day whereas sugar work is not really meant to be eaten. All you get to do with sugar is look at it. 

Sugar! It is usually used to make showpieces for buffet. So it is meant to be art. Yes sugar is beautiful. We did sugar casting, pressed sugar, rock sugar, pulled sugar, pas tillage and the hardest of all, blowing sugar. Blown sugar looks a lot like blown glass. It breaks like glass too. 

I described chocolate as being temperamental and how would I describe sugar now? I think sugar is absolutely hot! Literally ! I got blisters on my thumb the day when we did pulled sugar. There weren't any cotton gloves left and so I only had latex gloves. I used 3 layers of it but it was still too hot. 

Sugar Casting for the base of the showpiece

We made a small little showpiece with sugar where we are required to make a rose , ribbon and the base. I did not like my showpiece very much as we had limited time and I only had lots of red sugar to play with. So my showpiece just looks red! But I guess it is more about learning the techniques.

Pulling sugar can be fun if you can't feel heat. For me it was quite painful but I have to say it does look very pretty. We made some ribbons where we combined the green and the yellow together. The temperature of the sugars has to be almost the same so that pulls evenly. I struggled and finally managed to get one decent looking ribbon. 

Melting the sugar under heat lamp

Then I made a rose and also 2 leaves. The rose took a while as we had to join the each petal on piece by piece. The leaves were a lot easier to make as we had an imprint mould that we pressed the sugar on to get the veins of the leaf. 

My unimpressive showpiece

Ok made all that was required and stuck them together to make a showpiece. Not much I can say about my showpiece except that it is really red.