sparrowpost

Making candy skulls out of sugar is a Mexican tradition. According to internet sources, each skull is painted with the name of a deceased loved one, and then placed on the family’s “Day of the Dead” alter. WASP-y girl that I am, the notion of writing the names of my dearly departed in frosting on my sugary craft project seemed a little indecent…
instead, I decided to make skulls to memorialize all of the various pets of my youth. This was to be an act of atonement, as I was the primary suspect in most of these murders.

While I was able to purchase a mold to make the traditional human sugar skulls, it wasn’t going to be quite so easy to find a confection mold for a bird skull. Instead, I improvised, using bottles from my recycling bin as molds.

The basic instructions for this project come from Mexican Sugar Skull.com. They make basic skull molds that can be purchased on the internet or at crafty and/or Mexican-themed stores. Their instructions recommend making the skulls on a dry day, as they will not set properly in humidity. Thankfully, San Diego in October is generally bone dry (heh heh).

In my experience, molding the sugar base for the skulls was easy compared with the decorating process. I am something of a novice when it comes to working with frosting, and this project involved LOTS of frosting. Before decorating, I would make sure to have:
* 4 lbs of powdered sugar
* 10 oz of merengue powder
* 5 or more colors of gel food coloring
* 8-10 plastic pastry bags (you could use just 1 pastry bag, but switching colors in and out of it would be a huge pain
* Clothespins, hairpins, or other pins for closing the top of the pastry bags (once pastry bags are sealed, the icing can stay unhardened for quite a while… the colors tend to separate, but they can be re-mixed without much trouble
* One package of colored foil, available at some craft shops (esp. Mexican ones… look for a shop that sells ribbons)
*Newspaper to cover your surface- this project gets messy!

Here’s the tutorial:

When I was about halfway done with this project I found that my skulls were looking really substandard. I headed down to my local Artesanias shop to check out the real deal, and the main thing I noticed was that the “authentic” skulls had LOTS of frosting on them. The frosting was also in darker colors than the colors I had bought. For a really authentic look, you may even want to consider buying black frosting.

In conclusion, this project was much tougher than I thought it would be. It was fun, but it would take a lot to convince me that I needed to do this again. Furthermore, I learned that I should probably drink less coffee if I expect to have a steady pastry-bag hand. Maybe next year I’ll try the equally authentic paper mache skulls.