So welcome to the final episode of the Pleasant Vices series and today we're
going to end on a sugar high. We're making a renaissance sugar plate recipe.
Sugar plate is a paste which was used for sugar sculptures during the
Renaissance period. These sugar sculptures would have been primarily for
display and not necessarily for eating they're actually rock solid you would
probably break your teeth in them if you tried to eat them but as a material
because they were made of sugar because it has that association with luxury and
wealth it was a perfect medium with which to display your power and your status.
So, the sugar plate recipe is made from icing sugar, gum tragacanth and rose water.
for anyone hasn't heard of gum tragacanth it's a bit like gum arabic
where it's a resin so it's like an natural gum, it'll thicken the mixture.
And rosewater is what I've decided to use because equally use water if you can't
get hold of rose water. The three ingredients are mixed together into a
paste which is a bit like a mixture, texture-wise, between clay and bread so
it's quite elastic but it's quite firm at the same time.
So we're going to start by sieving 454 grams of icing sugar, which is about a pound.
So you want to sift the sugar so that the mixture is very fine we don't want
any lumps or anything in there. We want a very smooth paste at the end so
definitely no icing sugar lumps. So to the icing sugar through our nice powdery
icing sugar, we're going to add 28 grams of the gum tragacanth this is also in
powdered form so don't get the solid stuff you want to buy in a powder form
this is normally quite readily available because it's used for cake sculpting and
things like that. So mix your two powders together and then we're gonna add the rosewater.
I've pre measured, this is 61 millilitres of rosewater.
I would say you want to use between 60 and 70 millilitres.
You want the final mixture to look like a sort of rough large breadcrumb.
So once we're at this sort of stage, start using hands and you're kneading it a bit like bread
You should end up with a very clean Bowl and a nice lump of sugar paste mixture.
So that's our final dough and it will start
solidifying pretty quickly so what you want to do is get it in a bag so it
can basically cure for about half an hour so just some like simple sandwich bags
Then put it in there and leave that for half an hour.
So, after you've left your sugar plate for half an hour it should
have firmed up a little bit so I'd recommend using a vegetable fat
something like Trek's and just loosen up a little bit and message it in.
There we go I've loosened it up a little bit now because I'm working with
the British Museum they've kindly produced a mold based on an item from the collection.
This relief here was created through 3D printing.
The object in the Museum was scanned using a process called photogrammetry the item
wasn't touched at all with photogrammetry just need to take photos
of an object and build it into a 3D render on the computer that 3D image is
then inverted and 3D printed to create the reverse of what we're making in sugar today.
And for the molding that we're gonna do I'm gonna roll out a nice heavy rolling pin
on a firm surface, you don't need to flour or anything because it's not sticky, it's just malleable.
So we're going to take our mold and I'm gonna roll it onto this mold.
All right, so gonna whip that off an there's our imprint in sugar
I'm gonna use a scalpel to just cut around this.
I'm going to just neaten up the edges by hand
and there's our sugar copy.
So after you've cast your sugar sculpture whether you've hand sculpted it
or used a mold we want to leave it to dry at
room temperature just somewhere cool and dry and for about a week so this is one
I made yesterday and even after 24 hours it's pretty hard. If you don't want to do
a block like that so for this one I cut around the whole mold so it looks a bit
more like the object to the museum equally while it's wet you can still cut
around it to create a standalone mold but after they have solidified they
should keep for hundreds of years as long as you keep them cool and dry sugar
is a natural preservative so you can have something to keep not just for
dinner but maybe even for centuries.
So sadly our Pleasant Vices series comes to an end
if you've missed any of the previous episodes click the link here
and if you'd like to subscribe to the British Museum YouTube channel click
over here thank you so much for watching and I hope we've given you plenty of
food for thought...awkward smile.