— Char Nolan

So I have all these sweeteners here. So let's just define what confectioners sugar is. And confectioner sugar is generally it is cane sugar that has been pulverized and it's also called 10 x. There are some that you'll see in professional kitchens that are XX and XXX the more X is the finer it is. So we can make facsimile, but we can't really make confection or sugar. What we can make is there's my confection or sugar. We can make super fine sugar by grinding our sugars. Now when I bring home from the market organic vegan cane sugar, which isn't white, it's tan, I keep some in a container that says cane and some that says lightly ground. And, and this is my, um, confectioner sugar. I also have cane sugar that I grind very fine. So it looks like confectioner sugar, but it doesn't have the starch in it. This is maple sugar. So my maple sugar sure is already very fine and I would like to, it smells so good because maple sugar is nothing but maple syrup with the water boiled off. I once made some, it's not very efficient, but I wanted to see, um, so I might grind this more finely even though it's quite fine. What I do is I don't add, I don't add starch to this. The starch is there simply to keep the sugars from clumping together. And so if you have a recipe that's calling for sugar and you swap out for confection or sugar with starch in it and vice versa, that's not a really good idea. What I do instead is I use these food grade silica packs and I put them in my sugars and then I put my sugars in very airtight containers. And that usually does the trick I have. This is soot, which is whole cane sugar and it's very coarse when you buy it in the store and it's ground. And I've got a silica pack in there and I've got all kinds of sugars here that I'm just gonna put back. This is, I wanna show you, so this is my sugar that you could say is confection or sugar because I think you can see it's very, very finely grant. I don't have any, I don't have any starch in here. Interestingly, to me anyway, when you buy confectioners sugar that is organic or vegan, which is usually one and the same, more often than not the starch is tapioca instead of corn starch. I don't know why. I mean, I'm thinking it's because it's more difficult to find organic corn starch, although I get organic corn starch. So, um, that's something that you can do. Char, i I don't think you need to use the starch. Also confection or sugar is also seen as icing sugar. There are various names depending on where you are in the world. Maybe you can bring me a little bit of your maple conviction or sugar.