I'm still working on what will end up being a life long task of making one recipe from each of the recipe books I own. I've got an addiction to them. To justify buying so many, I decided that as long as I make at least one recipe from each, then that makes them worth the money. Last week I bought three new cookbooks, and so far I have used two recipes from two of them.
This is the one I tried yesterday. From the absolutely brilliant book 'Gifts from the kitchen'.
Calling it a recipe is not really accurate, as all it took was sugar, food colouring and water. Home made, pastel coloured sugar cubes. Pointless really (I don't take sugar in my tea, neither does the husband), but so pretty.The book suggests 250g of caster sugar, but in truth it doesn't matter how much sugar you use. You mix it with cold water until it resembles wet sand. I use the gel food colouring, which is perfect for projects like this.
If you add too much water then you mix in more sugar to make it drier. Work in small batches if you want lots of colours. The main thing is getting the texture right, if it's too wet then the shapes will just splat (which explains why there are no finished white sugar cubes in my photos, the white batch was rubbish!) 
To cut the shapes, the sandy sugar is put on a baking sheet and squidged down. Then you use a tiny cookie cutter to stamp out the shapes. I found the easiest way of doing this was to stamp out the shape then drag it along to separate from the mixture, it sticks to the inside of the cutter so it won't fall out when you transfer it to another baking sheet, then gently press out with your finger tip. It's not as fiddly or delicate as it sounds. As long as you rinse the cutter with water regularly, you can do this part quite quickly. Once you have cut out all the sugar shapes, leave them to try overnight.
I transferred them to a fresh baking sheet halfway through drying, so I could turn them over and make sure they dried out nicely. 
When the Little Lady spotted them,she wanted to have one on her breakfast cereal. I was curious to see if it would colour the milk, so popped a pink one in the milk. It made no difference as far as I could see. I tried it in a cup of tea, and again it didn't seem to turn the tea into a murky colour. Mind you, I did make the stongest cuppa ever so it was pretty dark to begin with. 
How lovely would it be to have these to offer guests if you were having an elegant afternoon tea?
I made them for the sole purpose to have in a jar on the kitchen shelf. It wasn't even going to be a blog post, but they turned out so well I wanted to share the idea. 
I want to make some more today, or over the weekend, to fill the jar up. I need some white ones in there.I've decided I'm going to use them as cake decorations. Granted, it's doubtful that anyone would really want to eat a great dollop of crunchy sugar, but at least it would look nice.