Sugar Mice

This was my first attempt at making real sweets (other than fudge a few years which went spectacularly wrong) and they were really fun to do.

Unfortunately I have a new obsession with a weekly baking magazine (Something Sweet) that is full of recipes and exciting things, including; sugar mice moulds with string tails, a truffle box and mini cupcake cases. This is where the idea to make the mice came from. 

I was surprised at how little is needed to make sugar mice, apart from the mould and tails (which if you purchase the magazine, will come free with it), it only requires fondant icing (200g), pink food colouring (but only if you want to make pink mice), black icing and water. 

To get started chop up the fondant icing by cutting the block into slices, then into strips and finally into cubes. Try to make sure these are all a similar size so that they melt at the same time. Then place them in a pan with 1 and 1/2 tbsp of water. 

Once all the fondant has melted (at this point I separated it into two separate pans to add pink food colouring to one), bring it to a rolling boil and then turn it back down to allow it to simmer for a two minutes before taking it off the heat and pouring it straight into the moulds (you need to be quick to do this to make sure it doesn't start to set first). 

Immediately after pouring it into the moulds, twist each piece of string into the mouse. Allow them to set for about two hours, before lightly pushing the bottom of the mould to pop them out. These then need to rest over night (24 hours) to make sure they have dried out completely.

Once they have, you can draw on their eyes (and nose if you wish). I used a black icing pen for this but you could also use icing sugar and add a tiny bit of black food colouring to it. Then apply it with a very thin point, the only thing I could find (in a house of four girls) was a hair grip. 

A final top tip would be to fill the moulds right up to the top...as you can see on the far right one mouse lost his nose because of it.

And then they're ready to eat!