Pour Some Sugar On Me.. Ouch! That Hurts!

Yay! I’m back in the bakeshops and done with those odious classroom classes. And I am loving my current class and chef. The class is Confectionary Art and Special Occasion Cakes, all about the decorating aspect of pastry arts. My new chef is great. As my buddy Legolas put it, "she’s so... normal." She’s very calm and collected and straight-forward, with a dry sense of humor, and she’s worked all over the world in both hotels and restaurants. I get the sense that nothing would phase her. Like, God forbid there was a Virginia Tech/Columbine-style incident, I think she’d look up at the gunman with an unimpressed expression and say "do you mind, we’re pulling sugar here."

On Monday, the first day of class, she mentioned we would have a substitute Wednesday because her oldest son is graduating fifth grade and it was important that she be there. Legolas leaned over to me and whispered "I liked her before. Now I love her." Wow! A successful chef with a family! Spouse! Kids! Her priorities straight! A chef who doesn’t live 24/7 at her job! How refreshing.

Anyway, our first topic was sugar work. On externship, I had to pipe sugar a few times, which is a pain (literally) because it’s superhot and likes to go exactly where you don’t want it. But I kind of enjoyed the pain and frustration (much in the same way that I enjoyed hiking during a hurricane in Iceland). So I was interested to see what we’d be doing for this topic in class.

And what didn’t we do? Chef... I’ll call her Sugar Momma, demo’ed how to do pulled sugar, poured sugar, rock sugar, bubble sugar, blown sugar, straw sugar and even how to pour prepared sugar into a bain marie of ice cubes to get funky stand-alone designs. Then she created a quick showpiece combining several techniques. We were to create individual sugar showpieces of our own design, with a marine/fish theme and a certain number of minimum elements (at least one fish, coral, shell, a piece of rock sugar and seaweed).

Here’s a shot of Legolas taking a picture of Sugar Momma’s superfast showpiece:



We had about a day and a half of class time to do our showpiece on our own. Meanwhile, chef went from station to station working one on one with us to make sure we knew how to create pulled sugar.

Creating pulled sugar is basically step one of making the sugar used for pulling, straw and blown sugar. It involves boiling a stock syrup of granulated sugar, water, glucose and corn syrup to hard crack, then cooling it on marble until you can pick it up and work it in specific patterns, rolling, then pulling, then twisting and pulling at once, until it becomes shiny and then hardens. You cut the sugar into chunks and store them until you need them for pulled, straw or blown sugar.

On Wednesday, our substitute was none other than The Divine Chef M, my cakes chef from last year (and, by the way, another successful woman chef who also has a spouse and a family and appears to be terribly normal). But our substitute critic was the dean of the baking program, a guy who’s done a lot of international competitions and has a reputation for pulling no punches when critiquing students... for example, when I did my two-day practical exam in November, we were all praying we wouldn’t get him as the judge, as he rarely gives anything higher than an 80. (Fortunately, Legolas and I and a few others got the jovial French chef whose hair is always suspiciously perfect.)

I really wanted to do a squid for my blown fish, but alas, my attempts were thwarted. The squids kept exploding on me. And yes, blown sugar is done using a technique similar to blowing glass, by heating the sugar and then inflating it with a copper pipe attached to a hand pump. The trick is getting it at just the right temperature so it’s pliable and inflates without shattering, yet retains its shape. By the time I got the squid shape, the sugar was too hard to cut the tentacles and either exploded or crumbled.

Many a shattered squid landed in the "sugar cemetery" bucket chef had us set up.

In the end, I had to make due with a couple stylized fishes and one octopus that I was rather proud of. Then came the nightmare of assembly. Wednesday was an exceptionally humid and hot day and everyone’s sugar was sticky and melting. I’d made a lot of seaweed, but more than half of it wilted or crumbled or got stuck together. Everyone was having problems assembling their showpieces. I lost all the fins on one fish and one fin of the other just trying to peel them off the tinfoil where they were resting.

I decided to do something different with my composition and the rock sugar element. Normally, you make rock sugar (cooked sugar into which you stir some royal icing till it foams) by pouring it into a pan or bowl to let it set and then breaking off a piece to use almost as a garnish. I decided to pour mine into a bowl and then put another slightly smaller bowl on top so that it set in a bowl shape, and to use that as the base for my showpiece, mostly because I thought it created a better sea bottom than the disc of plain poured sugar we were to use (I just put that underneath the rock sugar).

As I was building my showpiece up from the base, I decided to stick the half-destroyed purple fish on the back to give the rear view a point of interest, but also because I was really in love with the tail of that fish and didn’t want to just resign it to the sugar cemetery.

When I stuck the fish onto the back, however, it upset the balance of the whole showpiece and the thing started toppling. I saved it, but realized I had to add a counterweight to the front. So I stuck on a really ugly shell that I’d planned on tossing and also a purple octopus, the very first piece of blown sugar I’d attempted. I was going to just toss that, too, but I learned early on to always keep everything until you’re absolutely sure you don’t need it, at least in the kitchen.

I managed to glue the fin of the main pink and yellow fish back on and then semi-hide the seam by sticking a piece of seaweed in front of it. I added pieces of blue bubble sugar in layers; I wanted to create the feeling you have when snorkeling of your visibility diminishing but still being able to see shadows and hints of things just beyond your vision’s range.

The dean was pretty brutal on other students, but when it came my turn, he said he really liked what I did with the rock sugar (everyone else just stuck a random chunk on as coral and built up from the poured sugar base) and that all my components were well-made (clearly he did not look too closely at that ghastly purple octopus or finless fish!), but that I put too much bubble sugar on (he wasn’t buying the layered effect) and the overall composition had no natural flow. I agree with the latter, and when I looked at the photos, I agree I went a little crazy with the bubble sugar, mostly because it’s so damn cool-looking.

Essentially, with the bubble sugar, I was like a little kid saying "look! I made this! I made this!" That’s how I looked at the whole project, actually. Wheeee! Look at what I’m doing with sugar!! It was so much fun, and even during the stressful, humidity-induced bits, I loved it.

Here’s the finished product:



From the bottom up, you can just see the edge of the amber-colored poured sugar disc base. No fancy stuff here, just sugar caramelized and poured into silicon molds.The white bowl is, again, the rock sugar, which has a really cool coral texture when you see it in person.The nasty pink-red shell laying on the poured sugar base is my second attempt at blown sugar. Yuck. I hate it, and it’s got lousy shine, but again, I wound up needing it as a counterweight.

Another counterweight: the ugly purple octopus clinging to the front right side. I’m much happier with my shiny bronze octopus toward the left foreground. The purple octopus is entirely blown sugar. The bronze one’s body is blown sugar, with pulled sugar arms attached from below.

The freaky-looking orange "coral" pieces with yellow tips are made from melting and coloring isomalt (a manmade sugar) and pouring it into a bain marie of ice cubes. Wicked cool. I love this technique.

The remnants of my humidity-stricken seaweed are in the center of the composition (the pale green twisty strands standing upright).

The big, slightly phallic thing in the center is straw sugar. If you were to crack it open, you’d see a honeycomb of air pockets inside, but as chef used hers as a support, so did the rest of us, leaving it whole. You make it by pulling sugar and folding it in a way that creates little envelopes of sugar with hot air inside. The more you pull, the shinier it gets.

My main fish has a gold blown sugar body and pink pulled sugar fins and face. After hearing the dean mercilessly critique another student’s showpiece ("have you ever even seen a starfish? Do you know what they look like?") I was ready to bluff and call it the "rare South African flying fish," but he never said anything about my weird birdfish, so neither did I. Actually, he did tell me that my marine animals were "recognizeable and clearly modeled after real living creatures," so maybe he is already familiar with the rare South African flying fish. Ahem.

The excessive mess of blue bubble sugar speaks for itself, but damn I love the stuff. You make it by sprinkling Isomalt and coloring between two Silpats and baking it in the oven.

At the rear left, you can just see the purple tail of my finless purple fish (the, uh, "rare Antarctic carp."). Damn I love that tail.


Here’s a side view that shows you more clearly how I layered the bubble sugar. You can also see the purple fish hanging off the back rim of the rock sugar bowl. And, quite frankly, you can see my seaweed listing to starboard as it wilts in the humidity.


And finally, here’s a rear view. One more look at that purple tail. I really liked the way both fish tails turned out, actually, and think that of all the techniques I learned, my favorite is pulling sugar, followed closely by bubble sugar and the neat Isomalt-on-ice trick.

So, yeah, composition-wise it’s definitely a hodgepodge, but as we were being graded only on whether we completed it by the deadline (all of us did), I decided to do the equivalent of coloring a single page of a coloring book with every crayon in the box. I wanted to play with every technique, to see what I liked and what didn’t work, rather than to create a visual masterpiece.

I was surprised that the dean was as kind to it as he was. But then, I had the only octopi in the whole class. As well as the only rare South African flying fish.

And one day, my friends, one day... my dream of SugarSquid will be realized. Oh yes.