I want to prepare a base to mount some sugar work and I have heard of "packed sugar" (made with water and gran. sugar). supposedly it makes a very hard and strong base....I have tinkered with various amounts of water in the mixture but it never hardens...perhaps it needs something else besides water to make it set up? Can anyone help me on a recipe for this? Thanks..

Hi there...I have made some fantastice Easter eggs with this recipe...

2 cups of sugar
2 Tablespoons water
1 tsp meringue powder
1/2 tsp cream of tartar

Mix it all together. You may need to adjust your water amount....it need to be like wet sand that will hold it's shape when you squeeze a handful and then open your hand.

Pack it into your mold or plate or whatever. With the eggs, I wait about 10 minutes and then scoop the insides out, so that the shell remains. I turn it over on a sheet of parchment very carefully and then let it dry for a couple of hours.

If you are going to keep it solid (not scooping out the insides) then, naturally, it needs to dry for a longer period of time. You can even put it in the oven on a very low temp for a while to speed things up. This sugar will become very hard.

I hope this helped...

Instead of scooping, I attempted to place one mold inside the other.

Works fine, but I can't find a decent mold that duplicates itself in just an ittybitty smaller size.

A muffin cup on a muffin cup doesn't work. For me gotta have one item larger than the other.

Besides, if you hand scoop out the insides, there is no uniformity to the work.

Any body else do this?

I have a dremel tool for carving on the sugar too. Once it is completely hard, I use the tool to smooth out any rough edges. One day I want to make a sugar christmas village.

Patrice