Spooktacular treats

Halloween is a big deal around my house. A. REALLY. BIG. DEAL.  I cannot say that loudly enough. Hubs begins working on props for Halloween in June, though he’s usually decided on what he wants to build in November…yes…for next Halloween. However, as an engineer, he is very particular about his props and I am generally only permitted to work on decorations and final touches. You know, things I can’t mess up.

So this year, I decided that we would host a Halloween bash in addition to scaring the kids on Halloween night. This allowed me to mess around at my work bench; the kitchen.



































I started out by blowing sugar spiders.Just because. But making a giant web that would support them was proven to be  a real challenge, so I killed that spider off…slowly…painfully..



And I got back to work.  I wanted to do something that was a combination of  techniques, so the photo above actually uses pulled sugar, blown sugar and cast sugar as well as a little chocolate molding for the headstone.
The base is cast sugar:



























I used an upturned springform ring on top of a silicone mat and poured my sugar in and let it set just until it was nearly set but still malleable. Then I pushed the shape of the outside to try to give some texture to the sugar so it didn’t appear that my tree was standing in a green pool of ice!  I also poured the moon, using a cookie cutter as a ring mold and simply cut out a bat from pulled sugar with a heated cookie cutter.



























Then it was on to the tree itself. I did this by pulling and twisting the warm sugar to represent a gnarled and twisted tree, using heated scissors to cut the ends into strips so that they could be formed into branches.

This was actually the trickiest part of the whole project because the sugar was very soft so as I worked on the trunk, the branches would droop - a good fan is your friend for doing this!

Next I blew the sugar for the pumpkins and the ghost, rolled a couple of owl eyeballs to stick into the hollow I created in the tree trunk. The spider web and spider were simply done with pulled sugar as were the pumpkin stems and tendrils.




















































The leaves on the ground are simple bits of pulled sugar as well.
Assembly consists of hitting each piece you’d like to attach with a blowtorch and placing them using tweezers and a steady hand.

The most important part of the process is the initial cooking of the sugar/isomalt. If you don’t get the sugar hot enough, it won’t set properly and if you get it too hot, it will set and shatter well before you are ready for it to!