Sugar Showpiece - Parts 1&2 of 3

We are now officially finished with cakes and chocolates and will be focussing on creating sugar art for the next three weeks. I've seen pictures of past class' showpieces and they are nothing short of intimidating. The entire class is a little reluctant to start and I think half of us are battling to find some motivation. This year has been seriously draining on everyone and I think we're all find graduation day a huge relief, albeit a bittersweet one.

On the 3rd week of sugar, we'll have one of our two practical exams and create a sugar showpiece. Chef has been trying to get us to prepare for this by encouraging us all to start making up a sketch of the showpiece, which I am finding incredibly difficult. I just can't seem to visualize anything on my own.

For the first class, Chef H showed us how to create pastillage (kind of like gumpaste) and some pulled sugar techniques. All of the pastillage that we make in this first class will be used on our final exam showpiece because it needs time to dry completely. No small amount of pressure there!

Here are some of the things that Chef H made in class with pastillage. The bright yellow at the top (looking a bit like fried eggs) is made with compressed sugar.

Chef also made a rose out of pulled sugar and some multi-coloured ribbon. He made it seem ridiculously easy to do, but we discovered how difficult it is the next day in workshop.

I won't post any pictures from my first workshop, as everything turned out pretty rough. The pastillage was simple enough, but the pulled sugar was something else entirely. Both Chef H and Chef F made it seem so easy and completely painless. I didn't realize how hot the sugar is the entire time that you're working with it. Almost everyone's hands were covered in blisters by the end of the workshop. And we all made the genius move to cover our blisters in medical tape. I won't describe the pain or mess of peeling those off of blisters. (shudder)

The next class went a little bit better, for me at least. Chef H showed us some blown sugar techniques and poured sugar in the demo. At the end, he whipped together a sugar showpiece with complete ease. The bird on top was made with blown sugar and the bases are all poured sugar, which Chef marbled with white colour and gold dust after pouring.

For our workshop, we had to put together a mock-up showpiece to test out how everything will work for the sugar exam next week. I found this class so much more fun than last week, now that I finally have a sketch drawn up. That being said, there were some elements to my sketch that really didn't turn out as expected.

The  biggest drawback to my winter themed showpiece was the fact that the blue dye only comes in powder form now, whereas last week we had liquid. (Somewhere in this school is an extremely blue cake.) So my dark blue base is almost black, and when I added the blue to my pulled sugar it resulted in a very gross grey colour. Not very appealing. Instead I made some "barbie" pink (as Chef H likes to call it) and had to make some other last minute colour change decisions. We're quite confined to the amount of colours we can use in our showpiece with the pulled sugar - three is the maximum. It makes sense after struggling first-hand to keep 3 colours at the right temperature under the heat lamp. But also the chefs will take off marks if we waste too much sugar. I'm going to compensate by colouring my pastillage leaves and flowers at home. One of the few things we can do to help prep for the exam and I am taking full advantage!

This is the finished piece. Not quite what I had in mind but good enough. I had more elements to add to it (more ribbon, curlicues, and snowflakes), but simply ran out of time. Hopefully the exam goes at least as well, if not better, next week. Fingers crossed.