[Sca-cooks] "Edible" Cinnamon Sticks

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Robert Downie:
>I used the gelatine recipe exclusively for all the sugar paste items in my
>illusion feast.  Once you let it dry _thoroughly_, it seems just as strong as
>the result you get from using the ready to mix powder gum paste. I'm not sure
>how the two items differ chemically.
>
>The only thing I haven't tested yet is how it holds water.  In 
>period, you could
>furnish a table with drinking vessels made from the stuff, and they could hold
>cold beverages for a couple of hours before they started to soften again.  I
>stll want to do that someday, it would be really cool as long as my cheater
>sugar paste didn't start oozing all over the table...I'm melting, melting, oh
>what a world...
>
>Has anyone already experimented with this?
>
>Faerisa

I have not (I wanted to get that caveat out of the way first). 
However, it occurs to me that if you wanted to waterproof cups, the 
thing to do might be to be sure to use sugar pounded as finely as 
humanly possible, with a view to getting as smooth a surface as 
possible to the worked piece, and then, when dry, lightly oiling the 
inner surface with something that's not likely to send your intended 
recipient into anaphylactic shock. Whatever that may be.

This is basically the same technology that used to turn plaster into 
window putty. You'd have to wipe away (and obviously, very carefully) 
as much of the oil as possible (maybe a large wad of cotton on a 
stick?), but a very thin, almost invisible film should not lead to 
pooling in the liquid in the cup, or weird floating films of oil, and 
should protect the piece pretty well from moisture. Whether this was 
done in period, I don't know, but it's possible a little oil 
sometimes ended up in the finished piece if it was worked on an oiled 
board, too.

Adamantius