[Continued from Part 4]
Party Tip
Party Tip
Divide your guests into teams and provide them with the opportunity to create a variety of sugar art works. There are many types of potential art works, which are described below; I also include some simple candies for those guests who are less artistically inclined. Make sure your guests bring their laptops and digital tablets so they can watch how-to videos. Caution: All the Internet chefs freak out about how painful it is to get boiling caramel on your skin, so be careful. The chefs were shriller about this than they were even about pomegranate stains (27 May and 17 Nov 2014).
- Caramel: Melting sugar to make caramel is the basic start of almost every sugar art work. In short, all you do is to melt sugar, where you have the choice of adding water, cream, butter, or nothing. This video shows how to make creamy caramels. If you are partial to celebrity chefs, watch this minute-and-a-half video in which chef Gordon Ramsey, the celebrated kitchen Nazi, shows how to make caramel.
- Spun sugar. Spun sugar is created by melting sugar and then letting it cool until it can be stretched into threads, which are then allowed to cool and harden. The pictures below give you an idea of what spun sugar looks like. Cotton candy in the best known example. This video shows how to make spun sugar; you will be delighted to find out how easy it is. As a bonus, the first two minutes of this video shows how to make caramel. This video shows how to use spun sugar to make a hemispherical cage (see first picture), how to caramelize strawberries and other fruit, how to caramelize nuts, and how to handle spun sugar with your hands. The pastry chef usually wants to place the hemispherical sugar cage over a dessert, see the second and third pictures, but you could put other things under there. Wouldn't putting a ring inside a spun sugar cage be the perfect way to propose? Here's another video that shows how to make a hemispherical sugar cage that is big enough to hold a kitten. Each of these videos is less than four minutes. (I find these to be the most transfixing videos I have watched on YouTube. It is so quick to make startling art works that you would have thought were totally beyond your capabilities. I couldn't hit the stop button as YouTube played one video after another that revealed more tricks with spun sugar. You can use these videos to guide you to others. For a written recipe for spun sugar, go to the site of my soulmate, Martha Stewart. The remaining pictures show spun sugar decorating the top of a chocolate dessert, spun sugar enwrapping a plate of desserts, and an elaborate work of spun sugar art.
- Sugar glass; See this video for instructions on how to make basic sugar glass. This video shows how food coloring can be used to control the color of sugar art. Below is a picture of basic sugar glass followed by sugar glass artworks.
- Rock candy, aka sugar on a stick: See this video for instructions.
- Cotton Candy: The same charismatic and resourceful chef who made the rock candy video has a fifteen-minute video that shows how to make cotton candy at home without any special equipment. He guarantees that the kids will love it. (My only criticism of this video is that the book that he puts in harm's way during the course of the demonstration is a library book.) Below are pictures of cotton candy as one would purchase it at the State Fair of Texas and of this homemade cotton candy. (Machine-spun cotton candy was invented by a dentist in 1897 and first introduced to a wide audience at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904; this dentist named it fairy floss, a name that is still used in Australia. I have always believed what I was told as a child, which is that cotton candy was popularized at the State Fair of Texas; Wikipedia shows that I was unjustifiably credulous.)
- Pulled sugar: This 24-minute video shows how to melt sugar, water, food coloring, and vinegar together and then manually manipulate the melted mass to put it into a form that you can sculpt by hand into whatever shape you desire. This is called pulled sugar because you need to repeatedly pull the melted sugar mass to elongate it and then fold it upon itself to create a sugar mass of the needed consistency. At the end of this pulling process, the sugar is shiny ("satinized") and can be handled much like Play-Doh. The first picture below shows the sugar being pulled; the blobs you see in front are sugar that has been melted but not yet pulled. One option is to mold and sculpt this pulled sugar into an art work. For example, this 18-minute video shows how to make a rose. The second picture shows a rose created from pulled sugar; this involves an acetylene torch, which is used to fuse the different components together. The remaining pictures show a variety of pulled sugar creations. The videos referred to above will lead you to many other videos that show a range of art works that can be created.
- Blown sugar (basic): Once pulled sugar has been prepared, a variation is that you can create an art work by using a pump to inflate the sugar. Inflating the pulled sugar allows you to greatly increase the volume of the sugar and, therefore, gives access to a much wider range of shapes. After watching the video above that shows how to pull and satinize sugar, watch this 27-minute video that shows how to make a fish. (The last three videos referred to are all by chef Kir Rodriguez. Why isn't he famous?) The pictures illustrate various blown sugar creations.
- Blown sugar (advanced): This site gives a written recipe for blown sugar and shows creations of the forward thinking chefs who create a blown sugar sphere with fanciness within. The first two pictures below show a blown sugar apricot; cracking it open reveals the apricot foam within. The next two pictures show how cracking a sphere open can release trapped smoke, which should have a fragrance appropriate to the occasion. A video at this site shows how to create a smoke-filled sphere. Q: Where do you get the smoke to put in the sphere? A: Easy! Use a smoke gun. Go to this site to buy a blown sugar kit for $49.95. (See this site for a brief history of blown sugar.)
- Glassware: This video shows how to make a wine glass or martini glass out of sugar. You can drink out it, and when the drink is finished, you can eat the glass. While the videos on how to make spun sugar looked easy, I will admit that the instructions for making a sugar martini glass are daunting; I recommend against having your party guests attempt this. If you insist, however, go to MakeYourOwnMolds.com to purchase the needed supplies. A reusable kit for making a martini glass costs $136.
See Wikipedia for a list of other sugar sculpting techniques.
Bring all your guests back together so they can admire each other's creations and ooh and aah at the truly protean nature of sugar. Then let them eat their creations.
Alternate Party Tip
If you think that your guests would be overwhelmed by these sugar creations, instead gather them into a room and deepen their understanding of the history of sugar by delivering an informative lecture based on the discussion above. To really make history come alive, as you lecture let you guests experience what is perhaps the greatest invention to ever come out of the Caribbean by letting them make rum drinks from recipes gathered at this site. The accompaniment to your lecture will be such classics as the daiquiri, mai tai, and an enduring American favorite, the between-the-sheets. When your party is over, arrange for a fleet of Uber drivers to ferry your guests home.
[Continued in Part 6]
[Continued in Part 6]
