Sugar Art

I was making some cookies this morning to give to the neighbor kids as a thank-you for feeding our dog while we were out of town, and when I reached for the sugar container I noticed that the different colored layers were kind of pretty.  The sugar we buy in PNG is produced locally, and it’s not the fine-grained, snowy white stuff that you buy in America.  Ours is more like what you would get if you bought “natural” sugar in the grocery store – larger grains and a brownish color.  The fun thing is that the sugar is a slightly different shade each time you buy it, and that’s how I ended up with the nice sugar art in my canister.

It is possible for us to buy American-style sugar here.  It’s called ‘caster sugar’, and it costs about twice the price of the PNG-made sugar, since it’s imported from Australia.  Brown sugar is also available, but it costs four times the amount that the PNG sugar does!  So I have learned another trick that I use when baking.  When a recipe calls for brown sugar, I use white sugar instead, and then just add a little bit of molasses or treacle to the recipe.  You can hardly tell the difference, and it saves a lot of money.