Tips for Drying Sugar Skulls

Video Transcript

"Okay, now these have only been in the low temperature oven for about fifteen minutes. So they're not dry all the way through. But they will be dry enough kind of on the outside where, if you're gentle, you can pick them up, and you can manipulate them. Now if you squeeze it, it will crumble in your hand, because it is still wet on the inside. But at least now, we have it at a stage where we can gently pick it up, look at it, and move it around. Like I say, they're not dry all the way. They probably need to dry overnight, maybe another; you know, six to eight hours, something like that. But like I say, just about fifteen minutes in the low temperature oven gets them kind of dry on the outside and sort if a stage where we can at least pick them up, you know, we can move them around. We can, you know, take our index cards away and they're not really going to fall apart if we're gentle with them. So, now, one thing that I just want to mention is if you're using the larger type of mold. Remember I'd mentioned that you can use a really large mold. Some of them come in two pieces: the front of the skull and the back of the skull. A lot of sugar gets packed into those, and you'll be waiting forever for that sugar to dry all the way through. And there's also kind of not reason to do that. So what a lot of people with do, is they'll actually hollow that out, once it's dried on the outside. So what that means is, if you had one of those larger molds, you would kind of maybe candle it in the oven for ten minutes or something like that, maybe let it dry a little bit more. But then you would actually gently start scooping that out the back of it, keeping it about maybe a half inch thick. Remember, we're talking about a sugar skull that's about that size. So if you're using a larger mold, you definitely want to hollow them out. But, you know, these, like I say, probably need to air dry about six to eight hours. But we can move them now. You can hear, they already sound kind of hard. And we can start decorating these right away."