Homemade Sugar Sprinkles

I’ve been interested in trying homemade sugar sprinkles for ages – I’ve seen loads of blogs I admire make them, like The Cupcake Project, The Kitchn and Brave Tart. They aren’t difficult – the ones I made had only four ingredients – but they are a project that takes a bit of time. So, of course, I opted to make them midweek, after work.

 

Learn from me. Don’t do stuff like that.

 

I was making these sprinkles to decorate a wedding anniversary cake for my parents – they’ve been married for 45 years! That anniversary, if you don’t know, is represented by sapphire, so I made blue sprinkles for their cake.

 

 

Side note – you probably won’t remember this blog post about their ruby wedding anniversary cake. It’s not much to look at, that post, but I am still very proud of the cake. Sometimes it’s good to look back at where you started, and see how far you’ve come – that is the case with me and that blog post. My cake skills were good, but my blogging? Forget about it…

 

Anyway, the sprinkles. I didn’t want to make plain sugar strands, as in all the links above – I wanted to make pretty shapes instead. I have several sets of plunger cutters for sugar work, in heart, flower and star shapes. I love them, they are a lot of fun to use and they add a certain something to your baking work. You can use them for icing, or pastry, or for anything else that gets rolled out and cut into shapes. Fun!

 

You have to start by making some fondant icing. I dare say this would work with pre-made, ready to roll (or rolled) fondant, too, but the point for me was starting from scratch. So, to make the fondant, I mixed the following in a bowl:

 

• 1 egg white
• 1 tbsp liquid glucose
• 3 cups icing sugar
• gel food colouring, any colour and any amount, until you’re happy with the result

 

The egg white binds the fondant together, and the liquid glucose both helps with that and also helps to regulate the sugar crystals. Did that sound suitably confident and official? Excellent, then let’s begin.

Now, straight away, I want to let you know that this makes an extraordinary amount of icing. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay way more than I needed – more than four times what I needed, in fact. So, another time, I’d cut down on the egg white and glucose. It’s hard to split an egg white, but I’m sure I could manage to scoop out a spoonful instead of using the whole thing.

You might need a smidge more or less sugar, but in the end you’ll go from this:

to this:

A nice uniform ball of fondant icing, dry to the touch and stiff to work with.

Roll the icing out very thinly – as thin as you want the sprinkles to be in the end – on a sheet of lightly oiled greaseproof paper.

This looks cool, doesn’t it? As though you could peel the back away and be left with loads of cool sprinkles on the paper?

It didn’t work.

I went to Plan B, and stamped the shapes out before moving them off to the side. It gave a result altogether more chaotic, but more importantly, it worked.

See that big chunk of icing? It stuck. Be wary of this.

Other food blogs don’t really show you these parts, do they? There’s a reason for that, I bet…

Anyway, once I had the shapes all stamped out – three sizes of star and two sizes of heart, as you’ll see in a moment – I carefully gathered them onto a clean square of paper and left out, uncovered, to dry. I also made some little balls of icing, just by rolling them up in my hands. They were probably ready after a few hours, but I made them a day ahead – do try to give yourself plenty of time, in case of emergency.

And there you have it! Homemade sprinkles. Time consuming, and delicate, and so pretty. You can control what colour they are, to match them exactly to a ribbon or a shade of icing, or just to each other. You can also control the flavour of them – you could add a little flavouring to them at the same time as you add the colour, if you wanted lemon or vanilla or mint or coffee ones. You also know exactly what’s in them, and just when they were made. And, ultimately, you get to say ‘I made those from scratch’, and that is one of the most satisfying (not to mention acceptably smug) phrases in any language.

I used them to decorate the cake you can see above – here are a few shots of the progress of the big ’45’ on top. The design was inspired by the beautiful wedding anniversary cakes that Ice Maiden Cakes does – click through and have a look. Julie makes absolutely stunning cakes, and you should hire her if you’re looking for something special.

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I love this style, and even though my numbers weren’t as sharp and as pretty as Julie’s, I was really pleased with them. The shiny dragees are *not* homemade, I should probably point out, but I don’t think they’re beyond me, either. With any of these homemade sprinkles, you could paint them with glitter or spray with lustre to add shine, to both them and your entire house. That glitter really does get everywhere.

One final photo – the side of the cake. I had originally planned on fewer sprinkles in a simpler pattern, but it got away from me a bit. Once you start, it can be hard to stop. I like how the plain rounds fit in here with the busier shapes. I also just love the tiny star sprinkles, they’re the cutest.

Satur(Sun)day Snapshots: S’Mores

Alright, I’m a day late here. A day and a half, really, since I usually post at lunchtime. The G man and I are just back (aout two hours ago) from the Wickerman Festival, and I was in an absolute guddle before we left, with one thing and another, and never did get round to scheduling this post.

It’s a true snapshots post, with very few words – another lesson from the G man, much like our Caesar Masterclass a couple of weeks ago. This time we’ll look at how we made s’mores over an open fire and realised how difficult it is to get a melted marshmallow off a bamboo skewer without getting it in your own (and everyone else’s) hair. Does anyone have any tips on that?

Also, the marshmallow in these photos is pretty pale – we were a bit worried about melting it right off the skewer and into the fire, but we did make them progressively toastier and more delicious as we went along.

The marshmallow/hair situation didn’t improve, though.

First, buy your s’mores kit.

It contains these things.

Ready the crackers and chocolate.

Toast the marshmallow…

… with FIRE.

Plonk marshmallow on chocolate.

Sandwich and squish.

Remove stick before biting.

Examine carefully.

HAUM.

Here’s something nobody tells you: raccoons love s’mores. As soon as we started making them, this big bruiser of a raccoon came sauntering up. And at first I was like ‘look at his wee faaaaaaaaaace!’ and then, quite quickly, that became ‘I am quite frightened of this raccoon he looks like he could take me in a fight’.

I only have these blurry photos, which I am sad about – it was low light and I might have been half way up a tree to get away from the wild (possibly rabid) animal.

If nothing else, if I’d had to go to the hospital because I’d been bitten by a raccoon I’d have been so embarrassed. They’d have thought I was such a *tourist* and they would not have believed that he was drawn by the s’mores and that we weren’t feeding him on purpose (which we weren’t, we only do that here in Scotland with the squirrels, which I know is quite bad enough but at least they won’t give you rabies maybes [HA! I just made myself laugh. Rabies maybes.]).

I think he’s doing some kind of dance move in that second one. Perhaps he thought we’d throw him a treat if he performed.

No way, dude. Those marshmallows were all ours.

Titan Travel Supper Club: Chocolate and Hazelnut Biscotti

I was asked this month if I’d like to take part in another supper club, this time by Craig at Titan Travel. When he told me the country we were visiting this month was Italy, and the recipe we were trying was biscotti, I was all over it. Titan sent me a gift card to pay for the ingredients – thank you! – and I was not otherwise compensated for writing this post. They’re all my words and thoughts about the recipe, don’tcha know.

 

Click the link to pop over to Titan Travel and learn a bit more about biscotti, and Tuscany while you’re at it. Then, you can have a go at baking some biscotti for yourself. The recipe itself comes from Chocolate Log Blog

 

I’m not gonna lie, there were some touch and go moments for me with this recipe. When you make a new recipe, especially a recipe for something you’ve never tried before, there are often little things that trip you up. For example, with this recipe, the advice was to add a little water to the biscuit dough if it didn’t seem to be holding together. I added only enough so that the dough would just hold together, when I’d given it a bit of a knead. In the end, this wasn’t enough – and I ended up with a lot of biscotti crumbs round my kitchen as I tried to slice it up for the second bake. So, heed my words, and make sure your dough is suitably squidgy before putting it in the oven the first time round – then, when you’re slicing it up, it won’t give you so many projectiles. I would still recommend going in with your hands, though, to make sure it’s all mixed up properly. Yes, your hands will get all chocolatey – but if that’s something you want to avoid, maybe baking isn’t the hobby for you?

 

Here’s a visual aid. See how the dough has cracks through it, even though it looks sticky and shiny? You might want to add some more liquid until the surface is uniformly smooth.

 

It looked fine, to my untrained eye, when I rolled it out into logs – but those logs expand in the oven, and if they’re really craggy round the edges, this is where you’re going to find bits breaking off and littering the kitchen (or gravitating into your face, completely by accident oh how dreadful).

This shows you the first stage of baking – once you’ve baked the biscotti as a log, you slice it up and bake a second time (biscotti means ‘baked twice’). I couldn’t bear to take photos of the mild carnage that occurred as I was going along, but I was more than happy to take a photo of the end result, which was really rather pretty:

The other thing to note is that crushing hazelnuts in the food processor can leave you with quite finely ground nuts (how rude). I did it this way but it might be better to crush them in a mortar and pestle or with a hammer (no joke), especially if you prefer chunks of hazelnut through the biscuits. Also, be considerate of which chocolate and which cocoa powder you use – particularly the cocoa powder, because it is the prevalent flavour in the end result. I recommend Green and Blacks cocoa powder (they do not endorse Rock Salt, though I’m open to them doing so – it’s just a really great cocoa powder, streets ahead of any others I’ve tried).

 

Finally, the recipe up on Titan’s website is currently missing a line of instructions! There’s a fix in the pipeline but, for now, if you’re going to make these biscuits be sure to check in at the original source so that you know when to add the sugar, vanilla and orange zest – just after you mix the dry ingredients together, if you just can’t bear the suspense.

 

The end result is very crunchy, very chocolatey and bitter-sweet. They’re a sophisticated biscuit, and they go especially well with a hot beverage of your choice, for possible dunking when nobody is looking.

 

Thanks again to Titan, and to Chocolate Log Blog for the recipe.