Sugar, sugar

This week began by cooking sugar and more sugar. In preparation for several show pieces over the next few weeks each person in class made two batches of sugar, different colors, to share with the entire class. This gives us a large variety of colors to choose from and the sugar only has to be made once rather than everyday.

These photos are of my first sugar showpiece. The base is cast sugar in a circular mold the silver/blue pieces are straw sugar, which is sugar that is pulled until it becomes stiff and then dried--used as the background for many pieces. The flowers are a simple hedge rose with leaves.

We also had to make several calla lilies for the first show piece exercise. The calla lilly and hedge rose are two basic flowers that we made for practice to get the feel for pulling sugar. The sugar is very hot and after one day my finger tips were very sensitive from being burnt by the sugar.

This is my second sugar showpiece. The opaque white pieces are pastlliage, a hard sugar that is like play-dough with a chalky texture due to the cornstarch and powdered sugar. Unlike all of the other sugar we use, this is not a cooked sugar and the only one that doesn't use granulated sugar.

Like the first show piece, the base is cast sugar and the tall pieces are straw sugar.

The new exercise in this show piece was making pulled roses from sugar. These are made much like gumpaste, marzipan or modeling chocolate roses that we learned in cakes class last fall (check back on those postings for photos).

The last sugar exercise this week was creating bows, much like the chocolate bows we made last week. I didn't have much luck in the exercise because the sugar colors were not the same consistency when I began pulling, also the color combination was not very attractive. I hope to be able to try this again with better success.

On Friday we reverted back to chocolate for the morning with a field trip to a local chocolate factory, Guittard. This factory is not normally open to the public, but because we are all perspective future clients they see it as a marketing tool--how lucky we are! This is the chocolate that we used in our candy making in the first few weeks of class. Guittard is a family owned business, which is rare anymore--it has been almost two years since Berkeley local Scharffen Berger was bought by Hersey's.

On the tour we saw how chocolate is made from beginning (bean from the tropics) to end (chip, block etc.). It was fascinating and much more complex than many of us realize. I thought that one of the more interesting parts of the process is even before it reaches the factory. In third world countries around the world (countries mainly Africa and South America) the pods containing the beans are cut from the trees, beans released and thrown on the jungle floor where they sit and ferment for several days before being retrieved. Funny to think that the chocolate we all love was once sitting on the floor of the jungle with everything else that lives there!

With the completion of this week, only one week remains!