A thing may look easy when some world-famous pastry chef does it on the Food Network; this does not, however, mean that the thing actually is easy to do.
Case in point: heating sugar, water, and food dye to the point of thickening, removing from pan, and molding it into your glorious artistic vision. It all went wrong between the "removing from pan" and "glorious artistic vision" parts, mostly because while there simply must be a point where the sugar is both pliable and sufficiently cool to avoid serious injury, this point proved rather difficult to come by. So I have a handful of weird knobbly shapes, an intriguing stalactite or two, and some fetching bits of shattered sugar that could mimic mosaic pieces for cake decoration if I decide to salvage something from this star-crossed project. We shall see.
Frickin' Alain Roby.