Flutterby™! : Oh, Sugar!

Yesterday Zack and I got together to play with sugar. We made up a half a batch of working sugar from the Pastry Wiz sugar instructions page, 375g sugar, 112g water, cook to 230°F, add 160g corn syrup and half a gram of cream of tartar, continue heating to 305, turn out onto a buttered marble slab.

We set up a heat lamp over the marble slab to keep things in the workable range, then we took some glass Pyrex™ tubes, heated the ends of them wrapped a blob of sugar around 'em, and started to blow.

It wasn't easy. The sugar tended to develop thin spots and blow out, so you could keep the ball inflated, but not know where the hole was. It was possible to pull out a small flat section and patch the hole, with judicious close use of the heat lamp, but it was quite the struggle.

The technique which produced the best container of the afternoon was hand forming out a sheet of sugar and dropping it over the back of a teacup, which gave this nice slumped dish.

For next time: Now that we've got a bit of a feel for the medium, that even with the softening of the fructose it's still got a fairly narrow working temperature range compared to glass, that blowing requires a hell of a lot of care and attention, and that slumping and forming on some sorts of molds works really nicely (sticks like crazy to metal and ceramic) we need to start with a goal of some sort, and use blown parts as accoutrements to more structural pieces. Maybe, instead of doing the bowls and containers out of sugar, do ornate holders for chocolate bowls, kind of like you might see out of wrought iron...