Confectionery mastic is the most common material for modeling and decorating flour products (cakes, pastries). Its composition is quite extensive, but the main component is icing sugar. Cakes decorated with this pasta are attracting the attention of their fans more and more - this is truly beautiful and delicious.
A sufficient number of methods for preparing this pastry paste at home. The most simplified option is a paste of marshmallows sweets - a little zeal and you will get great mastic. The recipe will be described a bit later. Marshmallow in translation means marshmallow, but it differs significantly from ordinary marshmallow, it is a souffle candy to the touch reminiscent of dense foam.
They are produced under various names and in various transparent packages: “Merry Springs”, “Holiday Sweetened”, “Bon-Paris Souffle”, Marshmallows, “Mallow-Mix”, etc. Their color scheme can be various: blue, red , white, plain. They are often intertwined in two colors like pigtails.
For cooking, one-color or white soufflés woven with a different color are better, then you will get a very beautiful mastic. The recipe involves several cooking methods, but more on that later. You can color the paste yourself using a minimum amount of liquid food coloring. You can also use natural dyes: spinach, beets.
Some useful mastic tips
- Any pasta (no matter how it is made) is sensitive to moisture, so that it does not shine through, it is necessary to protect the cake covered with sugar mastic from high humidity. As a basis, use butter cakes or dry biscuits.
Cake should not be too saturated with liquor or syrup. Cake decorated with this material must be stored in plastic bags or hermetically sealed boxes.
- So that the sugar mastic does not burst, it must be rolled out with a thickness of at least 3 mm. Indeed, under too thinly rolled pasta all the roughness of the cake is visible. It can be rolled out on a table pre-sprinkled with starch or powdered sugar, as well as between 2 sheets of polyethylene coated with vegetable oil.
- To give shine to your mastic, you need to take honey and vodka in equal proportions and cover the already formed cake with this solution and you will see how your sugar mastic shines. The recipe is quite simple and effective.
- If you use a cream cake, then before you cover it with paste, you must keep the cake in the refrigerator until the cream hardens. And after that, mastic rolls out. The recipe for its preparation, we now describe.
All of these tips will help you make a beautiful and flexible paste for cooking culinary masterpieces.
Marshmallow Mastic Recipe
Structure:
Marshmallow Souffle - 150 g
sugar powder 200 g
- starch 100 g
milk or lemon juice 10 g
cream butter - a teaspoon
Mixing powdered sugar with starch results in a plasticity result. During cooking, use liquid: milk, water or lemon juice. If you prefer a sour taste, then use lemon juice, milk in this case will not affect the taste. Plasticity is also affected by butter.
Sieve starch and powdered sugar so that we get a mastic that is homogeneous and without lumps. The recipe, although simple, but requires attention and accurate observance of all the subtleties. The souffle must first be melted - put it in the microwave container, add a little liquid (milk or lemon juice) and put in the microwave, if this household appliance is not at home, then a water bath will do.
For the microwave, you need to set the time in stages, first leave it for 10 seconds and see what happened. In a water bath it is easier to melt, because you observe and control the whole process of melting sweets. As a result, the mass should be dense and viscous.
If there is a desire to give the paste a color, then it is better to add a few drops of the dye at this stage and stir. No more should be added, otherwise the mass will be too bright and unnatural. Now gradually and gradually add sifted starch and powder - mix thoroughly.
As soon as the mass thickens well, we spread it on a board sprinkled with starch. To prevent the paste from sticking to your hands, you need to grease it with butter and knead it like a regular dough. Do not forget to constantly sprinkle with powder and starch.
The main thing is not to miss the moment when the material becomes smooth and will not stick to your hands. Wrap the finished mastic in a film and send it to the cold. If you wrap it in a bag, you need to bleed air so that a crust does not form. In the refrigerator, she should spend at least half an hour, then figures can be sculpted from it.
You can prepare the mastic in advance, in finished form it can be stored both in the refrigerator (up to 1.5 months) and in the freezer (up to 6 months). Before sculpting, frozen mastic should be warmed at room temperature, without unwrapping from the bag.