How to Make Spun Sugar

hey there folks today I'm gonna teach you how to make sponge sugar now it might seem like a really fancy decoration and it sort of is but it's a simple one okay maybe not simple there's maybe a little bit of technique to this but you'll get it down and you'll impress your guests so let's get started so first we're gonna make some caramel and this is this is really the semi easy part sugar just toss that right in the bowl this is 2 cups of granulated sugar and half a cup of water now I usually like to kind of run it around the edge to make sure no sugar is gonna be up on the sides of the man so I've got my water in there and I'm gonna use my finger here to just kind of make sure that all the sugars gonna get wet and then I do see I've got a little bit of sugar up on the edge so what you want to do if you have any sugar up on the side of the pan that can cause your caramel to crystallize later on in the process so dip your brush in the water get a lot on there and what you want to do is kind of let the water drip down and wash the sugars down in so if you see any go ahead and do that so now that we're going we're gonna turn the heat on okay now what we want to do is let the sugar dissolve completely before we move the pan because if you if you disturb it or agitate it it can crystallize very quickly all right so while we're waiting for the sugar to come up and turn into caramel we've got to get our setup ready so we can spin the sugar right when it's set to go alright so what we have here is a rolling pin that we propped up on two tall items also be sure to put some protective sheets of parchment down below it to catch the mess as well once you've got it set up drape a sheet of parchment that we were the top of your pants to do so here we can see that the water is coming to a boil around the edges that's excellent the sugar has dissolved yet so we're still not moving the pan so you can see around the edge of the pan we have a little bit of light color you can also see some sugar crystals forming what you want to do we're gonna give this pan a little swirl now sometimes those sugar crystals will just dissolve back into the caramel and that's perfect if we see that this starts to crystallize over we're just gonna start a new pan we're looking for a light amber color again and so it's probably not gonna be much longer so I'm gonna give it one last world and call it good I'm gonna transfer this to an ice water bath just very quickly because we don't want to cool it too much I'd rather cool it several times okay okay give it a swirl pop it in again okay keep swirling now I'm gonna stick a fork in here and kind of test this so you can kind of see that the sugar is dropping kind of in globs rather than threads but I can see that some threads are starting to kind of form and fly away so you can either start your spun sugar now or you can try and cool it a little bit more but what you don't want to do is cool it so much that the bottom of the pan gets really cooled because then your caramel is going to just firm up way too quickly and you're not going to be able to spend the sugar I'm gonna give it one more cold blast here what we're gonna do is move over to our setup and give it a try so you can either do this with one fork or two you'll get the job done faster if you have to you want to hold him sort of side by side like this so I've got my two Forks here and we're gonna give this a go see if it's at the right sort of consistency so you're just gonna kind of flick it back and forth over the parchment and if you get these beads like that a few fairly natural but I'm gonna continue with this because I think a few little droplets are okay now you'll want to continue with this until you get the amount of spun sugar that you want so one thing you want to be careful of when you're doing spun sugar it's not getting the caramel on you if you've ever gotten hot caramel on your skin it was probably the first and last time here we go it's getting a little bit better you can see us my my caramel is cooling down I'm getting more of the threading that we're looking for once you get the amount of spun sugar that you're happy with set your pan aside and make sure that this is kind of set up I'm going to lift up the edge of my parchment on this side and loosen it over here as well

and then this should just sort of come right up off it's broken now that that is okay because you can mold this spun sugar sort of however you want you can ball up the sponge sugar like this to use at the top of say a croquembouche gather up all these threads here and you can sort of bunch it together in a longer mass and use it to shape shape around desserts for a pretty presentation and if you want something longer than this you can just get more of the strands and sort of clump them together because it's made out of sugar it will all stick together this is a fun little trick to really fancy up your desserts and I hope you had fun learning about this so good luck