Pastry Course Day 27: Sugar eggs and the start of a tragacanth piece

I actually don’t have much to show for this day. We were busy making a piece out of tragacanth. Tragacanth is an old technique used to make sugar pieces with. For example, you can make a house out of tragacanth. Tragacanth is as hard as a piece of peppermint. Sturdy enough to build something with it, but fragile enough to break when it’s dropped. So the rule of the day was, don’t touch other people’s work, because, before you know it, it breaks!

Working with tragacanth takes up quite some time. That’s why this day we only made a start of our tragacanth piece. We had to cut out the pieces for our piece. Tragacanth is still quite soft when you’re working with it, so it is relatively easy to cut out the piece. After the pieces are cut out they are left to dry for a couple of days. I decided to make some gift boxes for which I cut out the pieces and put on a plate to dry. In the next lesson we would be finishing the piece.

This may sound easy, but believe me, it did take me quite some time. You really have to measure out everything carefully etc. You actually work with a blueprint which you cut out. Once it’s dried you can’t really cut it anymore without it breaking, so you have to cut it right the first time!

After we finished cutting out the pieces we had some time left to work with sugar. We learned how to make sugar cubes and sugar eggs. I really liked this, unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to finish my sugar eggs. So for this day, no photos of a finished product, but I did learn a lot!