Tumblin' tumbleweeds

So last night I frosted the cupcakes with the Buttershots icing, and spun some sugar that will go on top of them. Well, some of them. I wound up not making enough balls of spun sugar to top all of them, but enough to get my point across, hopefully.

I referred mostly to this article to get me started, and this short YouTube is pretty helpful, since all the words in the world don't make much sense when it comes to spinning sugar, as I was about to find out.

Boiling 2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup light corn syrup and 1/2 cup water to 310 F. At least the ingredients aren't super-exotic.

Preparing the work station: lots of newspapers, two pans, handles out, sprayed with Pam. Although this session wasn't as messy as I thought it was going to be. I imagined a kitchen cocooned in sugar.

In reality, this is about as messy as it got. More on the newspaper below than actually got made into spun sugar, but I'll get to that in a sec. Greasing the handles with Pam really helped. All this just slid right off.

So here's one that doesn't look too bad, even though it has a few lumpy bits in it. But I'm trying to make them look like tumbleweeds, so I want them to look a little rustic, right? Yeah, that's the ticket...

Some more.

So here's what it looks like on top of a Kelly's Kopper Kamel Kupcake. Kinda pretty, no?

Spun sugar post-mortem: I wanted darker strands of sugar because I wanted a more tumbleweed-y light brown, so I went an extra 10 degrees (320F) when I cooked the sugar. Mistake. At that temp, it continues to cook, quickly, even when I plunged the bottom of the pan into a bath of ice water as indicated in the instructions. So this batch turned out pretty brittle and didn't want to cooperate when I was trying to spin it out over the pan handles. Most of it fell straight down to the floor or clumped on the handles. But I managed enough to top maybe 7 or 8 cupcakes.

Also, seeing a lot of sets of instructions out there that recommend using a wire whisk with the ends snipped with wire cutters to spin out the sugar. Like so:

I had bought a wire whisk at the dollar store the other night, just for this purpose, but, as is typical around this house, I could not find the requisite wire cutters that I know are around here somewhere. So I wound up using just a fork instead. Next time, though... Anyone got wire cutters I can borrow?

These cupcakes are for my dad's birthday dinner tonight. Hopefully he will get a kick out of the little "tumbleweeds," which have been the bane of his existence since moving out here to Nevada late last year.