Sugar Blows

OK, in fairness, it doesn’t but I did some sugar blowing this week. It’s tougher than they make it look in all those videos. Trust me on this.



























So I had this great idea of making blown sugar pumpkins which I would fill with pumpkin mousse for thanksgiving dessert. I know, I know. I always have big ideas. Dear Hubs built me a sugar warming box, complete with an adjustable height heat lamp and my silpat fits perfectly into it.  Other things you’ll need:

Isomalt
Food coloring
Sugar Blower with copper tube
Blow torch
Scissors
Small fan
gloves (I used cotton gloves inside of food grade rubber gloves - the cotton helps with heat and the rubber prevents prints on your glassy surfaces)
Patience; lots and lots of patience.

I began by watching all sorts of videos on Youtube and other sites, on how to blow sugar. They make it look easy. They are bastards. It’s not as easy as it looks, though once you get the hang of it and build a little confidence it is considerably easier.
My first attempt (I didn’t bother to color the isomalt for my trial runs)



























I had tried melting the isomalt under the heat lamp but that’s a bad idea. You can do it in the microwave but you really need to get it up to boiling for a few minutes to thoroughly melt the isomalt and guarantee a hard texture when you are done (hard crack stage)

Second try:



























It looked more pumpkin shaped but shattered as soon as I picked it up.

Third try, It got a little more pumpkin shaped but looked like a white apple.



























So I gave it a rest for the day. Best thing about sugar blowing is that you can just keep remelting the isomalt. Oh and incidentally, use isomalt and not sugar since isomalt is not as temperamental with humidity and your piece will last longer without getting all sticky unless you live in Florida or someplace with intense humidity.

So, the next day - I put the isomalt into a glass measuring cup and zapped it in the microwave at 30 second intervals until it had a good rolling boil, then I took it out, added the coloring and let it cool a bit before pouring onto my silpat to cool until it was workable. When the sugar pulls off of the silpat without sticking at all, it’s about ready to work with. Don your gloves and get to it.

You need to pull the sugar, like you would taffy, to get a nice gloss and even temperature throughout the mass. Temperature is THE most important aspect of sugar work.
OK, fourth attempt:



























We’re definitely making progress - this one had a nice even shell and I like the coloring, however, it still didn’t have ridges, though I tried several things after the pumpkin was blown, without success.

So….. Melt that bad boy down again - and no, it’s not white-hot, that’s a reflection of the heat light!



























This time, I decided to try to get the ridges into the pumpkin as I blew it using, of all things, a wooden chopstick!



























This one was much more pumpkin-like, though I would still like to do a better job on the ridges. Practice, practice, practice.  I decided to finish this one off anyway so I melted the remainder of the sugar and added some green coloring to make the stem, a leaf and some curly tendrils.



























For the stem, I simply pulled the sugar and looped it back on itself, gave it a blast from the blow torch and stuck it in place. The leaf was made with a leaf cookie cutter and the tendrils were made by stretching the sugar into thin strands and wrapping them around a small straw!
I hope to get better at this and as I do, I’ll post a video so you can see what’s really going on.  Thanks for following along!