Squawks of the Parrot

Do it yourself decorating sugar

I want to get this down before I forget, since it's terribly handy.

Peregrine's birthday was a few weeks back and, for his cake, he wanted a seascape scene on it. Easy enough to do with some little dolphin and whale figures we picked up at A C Moore (it was something like $1.50 for a sleeve of eight) and some colored frosting. Unfortunately I'd had rather horrible luck a few years ago trying something similar--getting enough food coloring in the frosting to get a good sea blue means that all you taste is that nasty chemical colorant flavor. Definitely not good eats.

I'd considered a three-coat approach for the cake--crumb coat it, frost it with normal frosting, refrigerate it until it was a nice hard-set, and layer on a thin coating of colored frosting. Doable, but a fair amount of work, and it meant either making two batches of frosting or warming up the remnants of the first batch and frost with it. Two batches is pretty wasteful (It's a nice buttercream, but that means a pound of butter and 6 egg yolks per batch) and I'd had horrible luck rewarming frosting, as it always curdles on me. Yech.

So, the sensible thing to do was use a colored powdered sugar sifted onto the top of the cake. I made a positive and negative stencil (There was a wave--sea green on the bottom, sky blue on top) out of some parchment paper and set out to make my own superfine sugar. The stores around me don't carry it, and I didn't want to use regular powdered sugar because it has corn starch in it that leaves an odd flavor. (It's OK when used in things or mixed with a liquid, but this wasn't and the flavor'd be obvious)

Making superfine sugar's simple--start with regular sugar and abuse the heck out of it until it was a powder. My first attempt was with the food processor and, while it did a little, there just wasn't enough blade contact to make it work well. The sugar tended to fly around and not actually get smacked with the blade.

My next attempt, though, worked remarkably well. I dug out our bar blender, dropped in some sugar, and hit the pulverize button. And pulverize it did--in nearly no time I had nothing but a very fine powder. The tall narrow shape of the container kept the sugar at the bottom, in contact with the blade, and it worked great. A couple of drops of color, another 30 seconds or so of abuse, and I had what turned out to be far too much colored sugar, though that was OK by me. (A quarter-cup goes a very long way, further than I expected. I think I used maybe a tablespoon of the resulting powder, and the stuff increased in volume as it got smashed) It worked really well, and I was very happy.

As an added bonus, the color got more intense as the sugar soaked in some of the liquid from the underlying buttercream, as well as getting a slightly mottled appearance from the slightly uneven thickness of the sugar. Turned out darned nice looking.

Important Art Tip for this: The good paste frosting colors are all oil-based (food oils, don't worry) and don't blend in well with the sugar. It works OK, but you get flecks of darker color where the paste hasn't mixed in well. A nice effect, but one you should get because you want it, not by happenstance. Liquid food coloring works much better and, while it's not great (I used some McCormick liquid food coloring we'd had around because of a plumbing problem we were tracking down) it works very well in this application.

Posted by Dan at June 21, 2003 02:57 PM | TrackBack (0)