Halloween Sugar Skulls Step by Step

Sugar molding is EASY -- the walk-through is wordy, but the actual creation of the sugar items is a cinch. Don't let the amount of instructions worry you! This article is detailed, because it assumes no prior knowledge about sugar-molding on your part.

Many have heard of sugar skulls, or seen pictures of them, but few realize that it's quite easy to make them from ingredients you probably have on-hand.

These skulls are a perfect beginner's project -- I've taught people who had no cooking or crafting experience, and theirs were the skulls that turned out the best. Beginner's luck, I guess.

I often sell these at the local Farmer's Market, but this year I was hired to demonstrate them at the local grocery store!

You don't have to do this all in one day. You can do it over several days. Just stop at a reasonable stopping place -- I have the placed the word [*BREAK*] at the logical stopping point.

Calaveras de Azucrar are used as decor and as an edible treat in Mexico, and are made in preparation for their Day of the Dead celebration. I'm going to show you how to make these traditional skulls, and share my own special touches.

These are fun to take to a party and really make a big hit. They delight, in a happy way, kids and easy-going adults: "Hey, look at these...Candy skulls!...Too cool!"

They delight, in a gloomy way, your basic cynics and philosophers, too: "Death is sweet...yes, I will taste of Death...I hold Death in my hands...*munch*...Ah, I am so happily miserable!!!"

Something for everyone, eh?

Your biggest obstacle in making these will be getting your hands on a plastic skull candy container. They are easily available if you live near a party store, a dollar store (such as Dollar Tree), a big-box store (such as Target), a hobby store (such as Hobby Lobby), a low-income variety store (such as Family Dollar), or an odds-and-ends store (such as Big Lots). If you live near one of these stores, go NOW and get yourself one of the two-part skull candy holders. They are usually transparent. If you can't find these, you can always look around online and find them, but they are usually quite pricey online, unlike the 33 cents or 99 cents at these other stores. If worst comes to worst, you can try to find a hollow plastic skull decoration -- the plainer the better, so the sugar will not stick in the crevices -- and cut it in half yourself, into a front-half (with the face) and a back-half.

Or, if you can find only a two-part pumpkin candy-holder, grab it and look at the "Sugar Pumpkins" instructions at the end of this article -- the methods and materials are the same as for the skulls. Don't despair: These pumpkins look astounding, too. Everyone will either love you or be very jealous of your talents: Wunderbar either way!

I have made these for fun, and for profit. If you want to sell them at a street fair or farmers' market, I've found them to be popular. If your locale has strict rules about edibles, then put up a sign that says "for decorative use only" and warn people not to eat them. Truly, do they need to be gnawing on pure sugar?

Now to the instructions:

You will need:

SKULL and ICING INGREDIENTS
4-5 pound bag of sugar at least. Get two, then you have it.
2 1-pound bags of confectioner's (powdered) sugar
Either 3 eggs or some meringue powder (available at hobby stores and the wedding section of Wal-Marts). I use the eggs.
Small bowl of water
Optional: Cream of Tartar powder (in spice section of your grocery). I never use it but some swear by it.

DECORATIONS
To decorate them, you will also need:
Colorful candies such as Skittles, tiny gumdrops, mini M&Ms, etc (if you don't want to tint your icing, these candies will brighten up the skulls delightfully)
Colored sugars and/or nonpariels (those tiny colorful balls that come mixed or in a little container with all one color)

KITTENEYES HINT:
When I'm making lots of these, I go with the white icing and stick the candies on them or sprinkle the wet icing with the nonpariels, it's easier than having several different bags of colored icing to make, separate, and apply...MUCH easier...but if you *want* to use colored icing, just add a few drops of food coloring to your icing once it's made. Divide your icing into smaller bowls if you want different colors, then add the food color and mix with a spoon. You'll need a separate icing bag for each color.

BRAINS
An Optional Kitteneyes' Touch:
To fill their empty little skulls, have gummy worms, mini Tootsie Rolls (unwrapped, the chocolate ones are perfect for those with poop for brains), or candy corn or other small unwrapped candies.

Watch who you give the Tootsie-Roll-filled ones to, I can vouch that it's really quite painful to have one of these skulls bounced off your own skull...

TOOLS

The two-part skull
Little old spoon
Table knife or back of a sharp one
Damp kitchen towels (two)
Dry kitchen towels (two)
Icing bag w/tip OR use waxed paper or parchment paper folded into a triangle (search the Internet for how to fold this, if you are unsure -- many good sites out there that share this -- I just make a cone with several layers, tape the loose side, put in some icing, squeeze it down to the tip and snip off a tiny bit at the end.)
Several large bowls
Many paper towels

Dishpan full of slightly soapy warm water
Dishpan full of rinse water

Pieces of corrugated cardboard you've cut out of boxes, with waxed paper or foil on top of them, big enough to hold one skull face or back, flat-side-down -- the size will depend on your mold, I cut my cardboard into maybe 4-inch square pieces. You place the skull halves on these to dry.

To make the skulls

Get your bag of sugar and a large bowl. Take your skull back-of-head mold, and fill it with sugar. Dump into the bowl. Do that the number of times to equal DOUBLE the number of skulls you want -- if you want to make a dozen skulls, do this TWENTY-FOUR times -- and then ADD 8 MORE scoops. Why? The sugar compacts when dampened, and you are trying to make an extra one as a tester, too.

Don't try to make more than 12 whole sugar skulls at a time, MAX. They will swarm on you and you'll be overwhelmed and the kitchen will be a scene of terrible carnage. Innocent sugar will be spilled...

To the sugar in the bowl, you will add drops of water. Dip your fingers into a bowl or cup of water, and shake them off onto the sugar. Do this several times. Use your hands to start scrunching the sugar and the water-dampened sugar together. What you are looking for is to get your sugar the consistency of slightly damp sand. Keep scrunching...squeeze a fistful of sugar...release...is it holding the marks of your fingers? Then it is ready. If it just pours out of your hand like sand, then it isn't damp enough -- shake in a few more water drops and keep scrunching it and check again. You do NOT want your sugar too damp.

PACKING THE MOLD HALVES

Do your faces first. They are more critical than the backs of the skulls, which can look sort of shoddy and no one will be the wiser.

KITTENEYES ALERT: It's best to pack them with your hand -- you can use a spoon, but it tends to make the sugar slip around or not fill in properly.

Take your face mold and pack it with sugar. Pack it very firmly.
Take your knife and scrape along the top of the mold to get it flat. Make the excess sugar fall back into the bowl of damp sugar.
ONCE YOU'VE FINISHED PACKING IT & LEVELING IT, TAKE YOUR VERY DAMP KITCHEN TOWEL AND DRAPE IT OVER THE BOWL OF SUGAR. YOU DON'T WANT YOUR SUGAR DRYING OUT OR LUMPS WILL GET IN THE SKULLS AND IT IS HELL.
Take a piece of your cardboard and put atop the mold.
Hold tight and flip mold over, holding it onto the cardboard, then lower cardboard w/skull down to counter and leave the mold resting on it.
Remove the mold by lifting straight up. Be careful, it can be easily marred at this point.

If your skull, when you lift the mold, has sugar just fall off of it, like a shower of sand, don't despair. Scoop it all up and dump it back into the bowl with the rest of the sugar, and add some more drops of water and mix it all again. It simply wasn't damp enough.

Now quickly take your mold (which is now empty) and dunk it into that dishpan of warm soapy water. Rub rub rub the inside surfaces clean of sticky sugar, using a bit of paper towel or a sponge. Take it out, plunge it into the rinse water, remove and use your paper towels to DRY IT completely. Oh, it must be dry, bone dry & clean, so to speak, or your next skull will not come out of the mold completely. Keep your used papertowels, you can use them for something else later, like sugar clean-up.

Carry the dry skull mold back over to the sugar bowl,
remove the towel,
pack the face-half again,
level, cover the sugar with the towel again,
put cardboard atop the mold,
invert,
set on counter,
remove mold,
wash, rinse, dry...

Do this until you have the number of faces you will need. MAKE ONE EXTRA.

Repeat with the back of the skull mold, until you have enough. If you have enough sugar, MAKE ONE EXTRA.

Your skull pieces are, at this point, scattered around the counters or maybe the table, each half is sitting on its little piece of cardboard.

This is the hard part.
You want them to be partially dry.
You want to be able to use that little spoon to hollow them out quite a bit.
You don't want them too dry, or you won't be able to scrape out the sugar and you'll have a solid skull that weighs a ton.
Too damp, and the spoon will plunge through the entire skull, piercing the too-damp shell, to its ruin. *sigh*

The extra face is your sacrifice. It will serve as a tester.

Turn your oven off. Remember, you had it heating up to 300.

Place the skulls, on their cardboard, onto a cookie sheet, and put in the oven. After 12 minutes, take out one of the skull pieces and see if it is ready to hollow out. It ought to be. If the outer surface seems dry enough, pick up the face and turn your hand so that you are ready to use the spoon in your other hand to start scooping sugar out from the back (flat) part.

Scoop gently, just scraping it like a cat scratching on a board. Don't jab the spoon into it. Keep spooning the extra sugar into the sugar bowl.
Don't scrape too thin. You want to get rid of enough sugar so that the skull is like a shell.
Once you have just a shell of sugar remaining -- not too thin, please -- place it back on its cardboard, somewhere on the counter, and let it finish drying completely.

Now do them all, as rapidly as you can, because you don't want them TOO dry.

If you accidentally let them get too dry, don't despair. Use a little mister and mist some water onto the hardened sugar. Keep the mist in the center of the piece. Take your spoon and see if you can dig through the dampened area down into the properly damp sugar inside...it is usually recoverable...steady now...the shell will be a bit thicker than usual, is all...steady...steady...

KITTENEYES ALERT:
My best advice: DON'T LET THEM GET TOO DRY. Better to ruin the tester because it's too damp than to let all the other skulls get too dry to scoop out...

[*BREAK*]

Okay, let us assume that you now are happily surrounded by your hollowed-out skull halves, both the face halves and the back halves.

Now is the fun part, the DECORATING!

By the bye, that bowl of sugar you scraped out is perfectly sound sugar and can be saved for other uses. It will be hard and lumpy, however, so it isn't good for some things, like molding more skulls.

Here is an excellent recipe for that rock-hard icing you find on these skulls, on gingerbread houses, and on Easter Sugar (Panorama) Eggs. If you use meringue powder instead of egg whites, you will find the recipe they suggest on the container. But this is the poor-man's Royal Icing, using the lowly plain egg:

Royal Icing (aka edible cement)

3 egg whites at room temp
1 pound of confectioner's sugar w/more in reserve just in case
Optional: add 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar to the sugar and mix it in first. I don't add it, because I can never lay my hands on it at the right time, but it is recommended.

Put egg whites in the bowl.
Use a deep bowl if you have one.
Using your mixer, whip the eggs until they start to look frothy.
Very slowly, start adding the powdered sugar into the bowl.
Keep whipping.

If your icing seems too thin, add some more powdered sugar to it.
If it seems too thick, add some drops of water to it.

Whip on a high speed for about 7-10 minutes.
You want it to be so well-whipped that when you pull the beater up, it will make the icing pull up and stay up, too.
Hey, don't pull the beaters up while they are running!!! Turn it off to check! Or...icing icing everywhere!!!

KEEP THE BOWL OF ROYAL ICING COVERED WITH A VERY DAMP TOWEL AT ALL TIMES.

KITTENEYES SUPER SECRET: I take a balled up papertowel and soak it in water, then sit it in the bowl, atop a little piece of foil or a baggie, atop the icing, then cover it all with a damp towel.

Why all this concern about keeping the icing moist?
At this point, you can't fill the icing bag full enough to ice all the skulls just on one bag. You will need to refill the bag several times, most likely! So, the unused icing must be kept from getting hard!

This icing dries like cement. And, it dries in a flash. Watch out.

Get your candies ready, maybe in little bowls or poured out on a clean kitchen towel.

Now, get your icing bag, with a fluted or plain tip attached (I do the fluted usually), uncover the icing, and use the spoon to put some icing down inside the bag towards the tip. Fold over the end so it can't back out on you...

I have all the dry skull halves sitting around, empty side up, on kitchen towels at this point.

Now, I put in the gummy worms, the bugs, the Tootsie rolls, or a handful of candy corn or other small unwrapped candy into the back half of the skull.
Pipe a line of icing along the flat part (edge) of that back shell. Then place the top (face) part of the skull on top and press down slightly to push the two halves together. The icing will connect them.

Please don't push too hard!

Set it aside onto a clean dry kitchen towel to let the icing dry.

Once they are all put together, the first ones are likely quite dry enough to handle.

Pick up a skull (now they are stuck together with icing, with the candies sealed inside).
Pipe a line of icing around the seam. I use a back-and-forth motion to make the icing line look wavy.
Set back down to dry.
Do this to all of the skulls.

Once dry enough to handle again without mussing the icing along the seam (doesn't take long):

Pick back up. Pipe in some icing in the eye socket depressions. Put in a candy/candies, right into the icing. Blue eyes, pink eyes, red eyes, and green eyes look eerie! Maybe pipe a unibrow onto the skull, and put Skittles or a line of candy corn along the icing.

Keep piping icing onto the skull -- you can pipe lines or just dots of icing -- and put some more candies on it, or sprinkle on your colored sugars or nonpariels (those little tiny balls) onto the wet icing.

Place back down to dry completely. Now you're done.

I hope you enjoy!

Don't be too picky about your own work! Once decorated, they look GREAT and very festive indeed.

For those making Sugar Pumpkins: Follow all instructions as for the sugar skulls, with these changes:
When dampening the sugar you'll use to fill the molds, add in some drops of food coloring to get an orange color to your granulated sugar.
Color some of your icing orange, to put the two halves together, and some of it green, to form stems.
Go ahead and fill with candies.
On the top of the pumpkin, make a stem with either icing or a piece of green candy stuck in a dollop of icing (such as a green Tootsie Roll or a green gumdrop).

Kitteneyes Idea: Around the green stem's bottom, add some candy corn or icing flowers (boughten) or small round candy (all the same color, to look like berries).

Pipe some green icing to come down from the stem, like a piece of vine. You can even put little candies along this or maybe 3 of them at the end to look like berries.