Skip to main content
Dessert

Coloured Rock Sugar

A sweet confection made by boiling clarified sugar, adding icing or a sugar‑egg white mixture, and cooling into blocks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Coloured Rock Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar

  1. Boil 1 pint of clarified sugar in a copper or earthenware pan over a clear fire until it reaches the crack stage.

  2. Remove from heat and briskly stir in 1 tablespoon of icing until well mixed and frothy.

  3. For colored sugar, mix in food coloring with the icing before adding it to the sugar.

Set and break

  1. Pour the mixture into a papered sieve or an oiled tin or mold.

  2. Allow to cool completely, then break into pieces.

Icing substitute

  1. If you don't have icing, mix sifted loaf sugar with 1 egg white until thick, then use 1 tablespoon of this mixture.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Clarified sugar
Forms the candy base that hardens into a brittle, glassy structure as it cools.
Icing
Stirred in at the end to introduce air bubbles, giving the candy a frothy, opaque texture.

The step that matters

Boil to the crack stage. Sugar must reach the crack stage so that, once cooled, it sets hard and brittle rather than sticky or chewy. Too little heat leaves it soft; too much may scorch or darken it.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes