Make Your Own Sugar Skulls

Now, making hollow skulls is difficult, time consuming, and could easily end in disaster if you knock it - and then all your hard work would go down the drain! But, you can get the same delicious, attractive effect in a much simpler and more user-friendly way.

You can make a very basic Sugar Skull with two simple ingredients - sugar, and water. If you haven't actually got those in your house, I'll wait here while you go get them...

Done? Excellent!

All you need to do is mix a little water with the sugar - caster would be best, granulated is fine, icing sugar will produce very smooth results, but won't be as pretty (I think).

Remember building sandcastles as a kid? The sugar is your sand. Now, you can easily hand-mould these into skull shapes (a rounded, upside-down teardrop), or you could grab yourself a skull mould to make it easy. Either way, make all your skulls up (I suggest about an inch to two inches high, but bigger could be cool too), and now you either need to leave them to dry in a warm place, or put them in a low oven for about 15 minutes to dry them out. Be careful not to melt the sugar if you use an oven!

Once your skulls have dried, you can either use pre-made icing tubes, or make up your own royal icing - by mixing lightly-beaten egg whites with icing sugar and food colouring - to decorate your skulls.

Sugar Skull - Day of the Dead Art poster by BluePlanet