Seasons of Love Cake
by Barbara Jo
Sugar Plates
Each layer of the cake is topped with a seasonally appropriate giant sugar plate - a blue snowflake for winter, a red leaf for fall, a green lily pad for summer, a yellow flower for spring. Modern technology being the marvelous thing that it is, ordinary people like you and I are now able to make our very own rubber, food-safe hard candy molds in the comfort of our own homes! Amazing, isn't it? We purchased five pounds of a two-part, food-safe rubber mold compound from a site called chefrubber.com, which, by the way, has all kinds of products that look super fun.
Our first step was to try out our new toy. I made a little leaf out of non-toxic clay and put it in the bottom of a paper cup. We tried out the rubber, carefully mixing the correct proportion using Barbara May's sister-in-law's kitchen scale and it worked great! First we painted a thin layer of rubber onto the clay positive with a soft brush to make sure it got into all the little crevices, then we poured more rubber on top of that. The pouring process was a bit difficult, as in order to avoid getting bubbles in the mold, we had to pour the rubber in a very thin stream out a tiny hole in the mixing cup. The mold dried sturdy and detailed, and it pulled away easily from both the cup and the clay. We make some hard candy and poured it into the mold once again with great success! The candy took all the fine detail of the mold and then peeled away easily once it cooled.
Emboldened by our success, I sat down to sculpt each of the large plates for the cake, again out of non-toxic clay, on sheets of foamcore. Once they were complete, I built up foamcore walls around each to contain the poured rubber, filling in some large spaces with excess clay, to minimize the amount of rubber needed to fill the mold box.
Barbara May was at work the day I had chosen as my mold-pouring extravaganza so I was left on my own with a fairly nerve-wracking procedure to perform, but I bravely rose to the challenge. My first mistake was trying to mix too much of the compound at once. Although it doesn't completely cure for 24 hours, it starts to set up after only about half an hour. If that seems like plenty of time to pour out a paper cup of rubber, bear in mind that I was pouring it through a pinhole. It's pretty time consuming. Also that I had to paint on a coat of the rubber before I could start pouring. So my first batch started to set before I was done pouring, resulting in me desperately ripping larger and larger holes in the side of my paper bucket until finally I gave up and just poured it over the side. (If you're wondering why I didn't just scrap that batch of rubber and start over, it was because I wasn't sure I would have enough to do all four molds and so I couldn't afford to waste any. It's not something I could just run out to the grocery store and buy more of.) This did, indeed result in quite a few bubbles. I popped the larger ones with a pin and, as always, hoped for the best.
The rest of the pouring went better, as I worked in smaller batches, though I was also worried by one batch that I didn't quite mix as well as I should have, but it seemed to set up with no adverse effects. By the end I was such a pro that I was pouring rubber into one mold box with one hand while painting rubber onto another clay positive with the other hand. I even took pictures with my right hand of my left hand pouring the rubber into the mold box.
An anxious day followed until I could safely pull the molds off of the clay positives, but it was worth the wait. The molds looked great! We washed them with soap and water, as per the instructions and we were ready to the pour the sugar plates.
My original plan had been to pour each plate in two different colors so, for instance, the autumn leaves would be a light gold in the veins and darker amber in the areas in between. I expected that the second color of sugar, poured over the first, would melt the first color and the two would blend smoothly together. Boy, was I wrong. I tried this experiment first on the autumn leaf and it didn't work at all. Not only did the two colors not blend together at all, but the second color didn't flow all the way in next to the first color, so I had big ugly grooves on my sugar plate. I decided to try it with just one color.
Not only did this produce a nice, clean leaf, but it was also much faster, easier, less wasteful of sugar and it even produced some of the bi-tonal effect I was looking for all on its own. Because sugar is translucent and the molds were of various thicknesses, the deep areas looked much darker than the shallow areas. I was really pleased with the result.
I proceeded to pour the yellow flower and the green lily pad this way, which brought me finally to the largest sugar plate, the snowflake. Now, we wanted the snowflake to be a very pale blue, just a hint of color, really. To accomplish this with sugar would be very difficult because cooked sugar always has a bit of an amber tint. We decided to try using a clear sugar substitute called isomalt, which we learned about at a Pulled Sugar class we took recently. Isomalt is pretty amazing stuff. It comes in the form of opaque white crystals, larger than sugar crystals and you don't need to add water or anything or even stir it while it melts. It won't burn the way sugar will and, unlike sugar, it's perfectly clear. You also have to heat it to a much higher temperature than sugar, which was a little scary, especially since I was stupid enough to do this barefoot, instead of wearing my steel-toed boots, which should have been the obvious thing to do, considering that this process involved me carrying a pot of 400 degree liquid from the kitchen to the garage. Fortunately, the whole thing went without mishap, although I was shocked by how quickly the isomalt heated up. It didn't behave the way sugar does at all, which I suppose is to be expected. I tinted the melted isomalt with just a smidge of blue food coloring and poured the snowflake, which turned out beautifully.
For the finishing touch I rubbed each sugar plate once over with a damp cloth to give it a glossy finish. They had a sort of frosted glass look when they first came out of the molds, which was also nice, but the advantage of the glossy finish is that then if you later drop icing or something onto the sugar plate (which Barbara May and I considered to be more or less inevitable), you can wipe it off without damaging the finish of the plate.
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