When it comes to sculptures of sugar, the good taste must belong to the artisan - and chef Mohan De Silva has it.
"I love this material," he says, crafting a vividly beribboned Easter egg for my edification at Simplicity Desserts, his gourmet bakery in Voorhees.
"You can see the results instantly with sugar work," De Silva accurately observes as he sets the golden-hued egg on a little black display platform a few minutes later. "With chocolate, you have to wait."
Photo by: David M. Warren/Staff Photographer
Master baker and confectioner Mohan De Silva uses a glassmaker's technique to stretch, mold and shape molten sugar into what will become a luminous and delicately detailed work of art.
He's preaching to the choir: Instant gratification is my favorite treat. Ever since I saw one of the corsage-like rose sculptures De Silva creates for Valentine's Day, I had to find out how he does what he does. Not that I would dare try it at home.
De Silva, a 58-year-old Cherry Hill resident, was born in Sri Lanka and trained in hotel kitchens in Bermuda, Bahamas, and Saudi Arabia. He served as executive pastry chef at Marriott hotels in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington from 1985 through 2007, overseeing 40,000 desserts for President George W. Bush's second inauguration in 2005.
I should point out that De Silva's sugar sculptures are not for dessert - although they're certainly a feast for the eye. His son Suran, who manages the business, says they decided to do Easter eggs for the first time this year because of the success of the Valentine's Day roses.
"People keep them for display on a table," he says. "They keep them as a decoration."
Larger, more elaborate sugar sculptures are for weddings, banquets, or other events. "I make birds out of sugar," Mohan De Silva notes. "I make everything."
He isn't kidding. He's sculpted a sweet array of flowers, fruit baskets, and themed pieces (aviation, music, clowns).
To start, De Silva combines a specialty sugar called Isomalt with nonacidic food coloring and water on the stove top. He kneads the thick, gooey results into a sheet and puts it in a microwave ("my biggest tool"), where it's baked into inch-thick planks.
"I always make two or three pounds of each color and store them," says De Silva, who later breaks up the hardened planks into easy-to-use chunks. These he reheats into taffy-like pliability.
Working without gloves so "I can feel it much better with my fingertips," the chef places a blob on a silicone mat and gets to work pulling, rolling, and folding. His other tools - a warming lamp, a small propane torch, scissors, a cool-air blow drier - are at the ready.
De Silva explains that manipulating the material allows air to enter, intensifying the color to a pearly sheen. "I'm putting all the seams into the middle," he notes. "You don't want to see the seams."
When it's ready, colorwise and otherwise, he rolls an egg-size ball. "This is called a 'pear' in sugar language," he says.
Using a rubber bulb and tube ("like taking your blood pressure"), De Silva pumps air into the pear while rolling it gently in his palm.
"It's just like blowing glass . . . the same technique," he says. "You can pump it into any shape you want it. But if you blow too much air into it, it will shatter. Just like glass."
Photo by: David M. Warren/Staff Photographer
The artisan's result: A blown-sugar Easter egg.
A minute or so later, De Silva says with a flourish, "I have an egg. That's it; here we go. An egg."
Although he prefers sugar over chocolate for decorative work ("chocolate is messy, and you're messy"), De Silva does allow that sugar can be "a very tough" material. "If you heat it over and over again, it will be dull in color," he notes.
But if all goes well, an egg from start to finish will take a little over a half-hour. "Boom boom boom," De Silva says.
After 25 years of sugar work, he's got a few other tips, among them: Don't throw anything away ("sugar is expensive"). And he's happy to share his expertise; after all, he learned by watching other chefs.
"I love teaching kids," he says. "Especially when they come out of school and they think they know everything."
De Silva also enjoys the "creative, problem-solving" aspects of designer desserts. And the engineering involved in some of his more elaborate sugar sculptures - like the aviation-theme piece with its hot-air balloons - reflects another professional interest.
"I always had a liking for cooking," De Silva says. "But I wanted to be an architect, actually."
