sugar + water + heat=amazing fun

after our hike up sugarloaf, i went to class for what was the best evening of class yet.  the week started off pretty slow because we were preparing the stuff we needed for our plated dessert practice on saturday.  thursday night we made tuiles and florentines, which are both fragile and somewhat frustrating to make.  both are batters that are baked in thin sheets and then formed after they come out of the oven.  the fragile factor gets majorly frustrating and by the end of the night we were all super annoyed with our product.  so friday when we went into the kitchen, the mood wasn't fantastic.  however, we made some really simple sauces that were fun and tasty.  and then we got to do one of the most amazing things a pastry chef gets to do.  we got to play with sugar.

sugar is thoroughly amazing because it makes an amazing product almost entirely on its own.  all you really need to caramelize sugar is heat.  it gets easier with water and a little bit of acid, but heating sugar will cause it to melt and then do amazing things.  we were making caramelized sugar decorations for our plates so we used water and some corn syrup to help keep our sugar from crystallizing while it was cooking.  as the water starts to evaporate, the sugar begins to boil and turns into this crazy alien mass of bubbly lava.  eventually the lava starts to take on this amazing golden color and then it gets to be super fun.  after a few minutes you can start to play with it and there are so many different things you can do.  you can drizzle it from a spoon to make whatever shape you might like or you can use a fork and fling it really fast over a rolling pin to make super thin strands of sugar that you can then twirl into a mass like cotton candy.  we also used lots of different molds to make leaves and other shapes of decorations.  the coolest thing that we did was to pour hot sugar into a cold ice bath to make super cool designs and sugar structures.  you can also do this with straight up ice like the candles that we used to make in kindergarten by pouring hot wax into a cup of ice.  as the ice melts away, the sugar cools and takes on the shape of the ice.  if you have enough asbestos in your fingers, you can actually pull the sugar to give it an amazing satiny quality like ribbon.  it was really hard to do much with pulled sugar because we didn't have a heat lamp to keep the sugar from cooling and getting brittle. 

i found it to be a truly awesome experience and am so excited that i now know how to make some of the pretty sugar items that you see the people do on tv.  it will be a long time before i get that good, but you have to start with the basics and even those are super fun.  it was a little annoying because the weather was not cooperative in keeping sugar decorations pretty for very long.  humidity makes it very hard to keep crisp, crystalline sugar crisp and crystalline for any length of time.  we ended up remaking our sugar stuff on saturday afternnon, but that just meant more time to play.

saturday afternoon we got to practice our plating techniques, which were also AWESOME!!!!  dessert plating is just as awesome as cake, but a lot less nerve wracking because you can start over much easier.  here are some of the awesome plates that we made with our new found skills and collection of sauces and garnishes.  these are the plates that i did and then some shots of the table with all of the plates on them.

isn't sugar cool.  this table was like a sweet tooth's dream land.  most of the desserts were our practice galettes for our midterm and the frozen molded mousses that we made the week before.  the best combination was the florentine, which is like an almond brittle, with the mousse.  the flavor of the chocolate from the mousse with the crunchy caramel is out of this world.  

dessert is FUN!