Honey, Ah... Sugar Sugar

If you've been a faithful follower of my blog- thanks and kudos to you :) You will notice we (class PT12/CG/01) have just ended our chocolate series and are moving onto some sugary works of art. First up, sugar box. Apologies for this ultra delayed post but I wanted to have all the pictures of the final products before I start posting.

Last few weeks at BITC were all about fondant and sugar, we were taught how to make fondant, pastillage and royal icing. Like chocolate, the pastillage cannot be too cold as the sugar would crystalize hence we needed to work quickly. For those of you who are unsure what pastillage is, it is basically a sugar based dough used for decoration, show piece work and decorated molded forms; think sugary plasticine :)

The making of pastillage

We had to roll the pastillage, cut them into strips and roll them onto the round cake tins in order to make the sides of the sugar box. Those were left to dry for a week before we sand papered them, glue/seal them and attached them to the base which was cut and sandpapered the previous week as well.

Process of making sugar box

Sounds simple right? it is hardly the case. In order to decorate our boxes, we had to roll out somemore coloured pastillage and shape them into our desired shape. guess which is mine?

Left Clockwise: Saleena's,  Aloy's,  Malcolm's and yours truly :)

Next up, flood work which is something like stain glass painting. This is much simpler as we need not roll and shape the individually coloured pastillage. This flood work makes use of royal icing which is much easier to handle as compared to pastillage. We started out with tracing our designs onto the pastillage, next we outline the tracing with a dark coloured royal icing. After the dark coloured royal icing is cooled, we "flood" the pastillage with coloured royal icing to form the picture. Sounds cheam but it isn't! Think kid's sand art :) Anyway you must be thinking, "This is pretty bo liao, you can't really eat them" Eh... technically you can eat them since its sugar but it depends on whether edible food colour/ lacquer was used. These pastillage are usually placed on cakes for decoration and remove before cutting the cake. All in the name of beauty =D

Floodwork

I absolutely love spongebob as his uber cute and has an awesome laughter, albeit I hate the cartoon. There you have it my 2 weeks of sugar work :)

P.S: Sugar work was ok but the after effects weren't! Some icing sugar got onto my shoes while I was mixing and decorating and guess who invited themselves into my house!??! Tons and tons of ants =S