Coffee Table Book of: Sugar Art (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Sugar Art is a large format book of sugar art, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: tiered wedding cakes, sugar flowers, piped buttercream, royal icing cookies and gingerbread houses set alone on linen, marble and slate, cakes at rest in bare rooms and out on open lawns, the tools and quiet steps of the craft, and the fields and orchards where its sugar, almonds and honey begin.

The tiered cakes stand tall in smooth white icing, raised on slim pillars in the old way, quilted and set with sugar pearls, dressed in blush ruffles, painted with blue flowers, stencilled with lace and wrapped in gold leaf, in a bare whitewashed hall at dusk, an old glasshouse among lemon trees, a stone barn in late summer and on a wide lawn at blue dusk.

The sugar flowers are rolled paper thin and wired petal by petal: a pink peony, white orchids, sweet peas, anemones with dark centres, a blue hydrangea, a branch of magnolia, a deep red rose and a ring of cream roses, with crystallized violets and frosted fruit beside them.

The cookies are flooded smooth and dotted while wet, cut as snowflakes, hearts, autumn leaves and stacked stars.

The making runs throughout: piping tips, palette knives and flower tools, petals drying in curved dishes, the crumb coat on a turntable, dowels set in a lower tier, egg whites beaten in copper and caramel in a copper pan, with the cane fields, frosted beet fields, almond blossom, beehives and rose gardens where the craft begins.

Short notes run through the book, on how tiered cakes, sugar flowers and gingerbread houses are made, the long history of sugar, and the tools and materials of the craft: sugar roses are built from the centre out, a tight bud first and then the petals in layers round it, a thin first coat of icing, the crumb coat, seals in loose crumbs before the smooth final coat goes on, a quilted pattern is pressed into soft fondant with a straight edge, then set with sugar pearls, and sugar was once sold in tall hard loaves, often wrapped in blue paper, and broken up at home with nippers.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.