Monday, December 14, 2009

Brown sugar!

I can't post about the projects I worked on this weekend as those are gift related. But last weekend, I finally got around to making brown sugar. I was very (unreasonably?) excited about this.

homemade brown sugar

Martha Stewart and America's Test Kitchen both say 1 cup of of white sugar and 1 to 2 tablespoons of molasses (1 for light brown sugar, 2 for dark brown sugar). But I did three cups (or 4 cups? I can't remember anymore) of sugar and thought it was plenty dark and flavorful after 2 tablespoons of molasses, but that might be because my molasses is blackstrap. But adding it a tablespoonful at a time and seeing how it goes seems like a wise idea.

I've read that doing it with a food processor or with your hands is best, but I just threw it all in the KitchenAid with the whisk attachment and went to town. It worked pretty well. At least, the resulting sugar worked just fine when I used it. Very cool.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sarah, this is very impressive. Does it taste different from store-bought brown sugar?

Sarah said...

I tried a spoonful plain and thought it tasted very close to the same. The molasses flavor stood out a wee bit more in the homemade, but I'd guess that probably has more to do with using blackstrap molasses than anything else. We certainly couldn't tell the difference when the brown sugar was baked into cookies, though!