How to Bake Sugar Skulls

Video Transcript

"Alright, so I've got about eight skulls out of four cups of sugar with the particular mold that I had. So, you know, if you're going to make a bunch of them, you want to get a lot of sugar. When I made the two hundred fifty or whatever it was for the women of northern Mexico, I had these huge, huge bags of sugar, like fifty pound bags of sugar and I was making them for several weekends. But, yeah, so I got about eight out of four cups of sugar. I've got them on my cookie sheet here, everyone is sitting on a playing card. They're kind of nicely shaped: you can see a lot of the detail in the teeth and in the eyes. They look good enough. So I've got my oven set at the lowest setting; it's at about a hundred and whatever it is... I mean, you just want your oven at the lowest setting. And we're going to go ahead and put these in there. So remember we're not really baking them. What we're doing is actually, this is called candling them, like a wax candle. It's called candling the sugar skulls. And it's really just kind of drying them out with some dry heat. And so because you want to dry them out, you don't want the oven closed, you want it propped open a little bit. So I guess I could just leave the oven open like that, you know, which might get the house really warm quickly. What I like to do is kind of get it open only about an inch or so and then use a wooden spoon to kind of jam it in there and keep it propped open. So that's good. So now my sugar skulls are in the oven.. very low heat... let's leave them in there for... I don't know maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty minutes. And what they're going to do is that's just going to really speed up the evaporation of the water and basically kind of make them hard so that you can take them out and they'll be really hard and then you can go on and decorate them."