Superior: Sucre

We’ve finally come to the final chapter of our patisserie course: sugar.  Pulled sugar, poured sugar, and blown sugar are the main focus, but we kicked off this unit with some sweet confections that ended up being our last edible treats!  We’ve been so busy practicing making sugar sculptures for our final exam that cakes and tarts seem like a far off distant memory.

Lesson 14: Confiserie

Pretty straight forward: boil sugar to insanely high temperatures and we get three different confectionaries: pate de fruits, honey candy, and jam.

Lesson 15: Sucre Coulé

The base of sugar sculptures is made of poured sugar which is a slightly different recipe from pulled sugar and is simply poured into molds to form various shapes.  The cooking part is quite easy, but finding the right color and making the right pieces can be quite tricky.

During this first practical, my colors were nice and mounting all the pieces together went well, but…

…during the second practical not so much.  I had a general idea of what I wanted to do, something with panels, but hadn’t carefully thought about it, so ended up with an awkward Asian room divider looking piece with a gigantic green moon.

This practical was also a big failure.  My flowers and leaves were good but the colors were awful and the whole design was awful.  Someone playfully described it as a jack-o-lantern, which I completely agree with.  This was when I realized that colors were really hard to make.  My intentions to make a deep, dark orange turned into a neon “road sign” orange, and dark yellow turned into a browny bronze.

Although I genuinely like working with sugar and the creativity involved, the past couple of weeks have been a huge struggle for me.  I was sick with some kind of flu/cold and had so much trouble getting over it.  I don’t think I’ve ever been this ill for this long in all my life.  Quite a dramatic statement, but not an exaggeration I’ve had lingering colds and lasting runny noses, but this, this was different.  A constant (high) level of fatigue/stuffy nose/headache/blunt taste buds/low energy for two+ weeks. It probably didn’t help that we were working with sugar.  Despite its delicacy, pulling sugar requires a lot of strength, patience, and high pain threshold.  After six hours of standing in front of a heated lamp, molding almost-hard-as-rock sugar with blisters on your fingers, no wonder it took me so long to get better.

I didn’t realize how much my body was affecting my work.  I was able to accomplish so much more, a list that includes: five flowers, four blown sugar balls, a bunch of leaves, and an attempt to make a ribbon.  I was really happy with what I made and most of all relieved that I had completed something decent before the final exam.

For the exam (tomorrow!!) I’ll be following the design of this last piece with some improvements.  I’m nervous and excited but also quite sad that my patisserie course is coming to an end.  But…tears later, I still need to pass to graduate! Wish me luck and hopefully I’ll be able to sneak a picture before I submit the final sculpture.