Welcome to the (Sugar) Jungle

Doesn't my post title make you think of this?:


As much as I love Guns n' Roses, this post isn't about them (it's a baking blog!). One of the more exciting units at school was definitely our Sugar 2 section. We finally got a chance to pull, blow, and pour sugar into really beautiful, delicate items.

My sugar flowers I made

Toucan

The downside of this is that sugar is hot. Like really hot. We cook it to 329 degrees and then cool it down (but not too cool) before we start working with it. Even with the rubber gloves on, our hands were completely roasted. After two straight weeks of this, my hands were just completely swollen and covered in blisters. You kind of forget all about that though when you see how pretty your sugar work turns out.

That's the thing about sugar - the wow factor is high. Due to the amount of skill, tools, and space you need, sugar work is not the type of stuff the average home baker is making in their kitchen.

Crocodile

Angry monkey

For the culmination of the unit, as a class we made a giant sugar showpiece. We chose the theme "jungle" and all divided and conquered. Some people were assigned making the animals out of blown sugar, some people poured the base (a mammoth task given the size of the showpiece), others made the trees and leaves. My job was to pull sugar flowers. It's a time-consuming process, pulling one petal at a time and cutting it off the sugar, letting them harden, and then attaching them all together.


The final result was really cool looking. I loved the monkeys my classmates made, and the waterfall was really beautiful. Overall, we worked really well to pull this off, and I think it was a major success.

Final product

Week 26-27 Sugar

After moving on from the debacle of our first plated desserts unit, our next was sugar. We started off making some marzipan fruits. Carefully sculpting the pieces of marzipan to be the shapes of various fruits, we later airbrushed them to be quite realistic looking.


My mom loves marzipan fruits, so it was fortuitous that the following weekend I was going home. Using my level 1 basket weave skills, I made a lemon chiffon cake with lemon curd and vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream.


We also made a basket out of nougatine. Nougatine is caramel with almonds mixed in that is then rolled out, cut, and molded. It is VERY hot to the touch and was difficult to mold because you couldn't keep your hands on it for very long without feeling burned.


For me, the highlight of the 1st sugar unit was our classes with Chef Ron Ben Israel. Chef Ron is an incredibly talented cake designer, and I've admired his work for a long time. When I first looked at the French Culinary Institute, the fact that Chef Ron taught there was a major selling point. In person, Chef Ron was as entertaining as he was informative. Before long under his tutelage, we were making realistic looking sugar flowers. I wrote about the sugar flower classes over at Food 2, and you should check it out there.

Me with Chef Ron and a sugar flower I made

After sugar flowers, we worked on our pastillage projects. Pastillage is a sugar dough that dries rock solid and is excellent for supporting weight and building showpieces out of, but less excellent for eating. One of the ingredients in it is white vinegar, which is my absolute least favorite smell in the world, so I didn't enjoy working with it much.

My completed pastillage project

For our projects, we were tasked to make a cake stand in the theme of "Famous Moments in History." I chose to recreate Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering electricity, probably making it the first time it was represented in sugar ever (although who knows with all the crazy cake competitions that are out there). Using only edible materials - pastillage, poured sugar, sugar paste, fondant, and cake - I managed to do the event some justice.


It's been a really great feeling to see that my skills level is finally catching up to the level of my ideas. Usually I have these grand plans in my mind and when I actually make them, they look nothing like what I pictured.Once again, my classmates totally blew me away with the amazing projects they created. I'm lucky to be in class with some incredibly talented people; it just pushes me to think bigger and work harder.

Ben

Along with the cake stand, we had to make pastillage favor boxes

Highlights of my classmates' work:

Liesel's Noah's Ark

Mary's Sheep Cloning

Brittani's Babe Ruth's 500th Home Run

Janelle's 1st Pixar Movie

Molly's 1st Man on the Moon (her cake was shaped like a moon)