Squash Cotton Candy

It started out 8 inches in diameter, and at least 10 inches tall. Here at candyexperiments.com, there's only one thing to do with something that big. Smash it!

I smashed and squished my cotton candy together, squashing it and rolling it between my palms until it got as round and hard as a giant jawbreaker, about 2 inches in diameter. Not only did it get smaller, it turned hard. Listen to the sound it makes when it drops. It's a giant cotton candy marble!

Notice the color? While the original cotton candy was almost white, squashing the fibers together concentrated the color, making the final product a beautiful robin's egg blue.




Flatten the Cotton

I left my rounded mass of cotton candy on my dresser for a few days after I bought it. Thanks to gravity, it didn't stay round very long. Instead, it started to flatten against the dresser. When I propped it up against my jewelry box instead, it sank around the edges of the box, retaining the shape of the corner.

I wonder how long I'd have to leave it to let it get as flat as a pancake?




DIY Cotton Candy Machine

My husband found this great video in which somebody made his own cotton candy machine, and filled it with real crushed candy. The principle is easy: melt the candy, spin it, and collect it. The execution might be beyond me, though... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7E28_sJoEI&feature=colike

Cotton Candy Sugar

"I can't believe you're buying that," said my sister as I paid for the football-sized puff of baby-blue cotton candy on a paper stick. But there was a question I'd been pondering for weeks: is cotton candy the world's most sugary dessert? When you're eating cotton candy, how much sugar do you actually eat?

Aside from a minuscule amount of dye, cotton candy is pure sugar, melted and spun into a type of glass. To find out how much sugar I'd eat if I actually ate the stuff, I had to weigh it.

I weighed the candy on the paper stick, peeled it off the stick, weighed it again, and weighed the stick to double-check my math. It came out to 42.7 grams of sugar. That sounds like a lot--more than 8 Lifesavers--but on the other hand, it's about the same as a can of regular soda, and only a little more than a serving of fruit juice.

So is cotton candy the huge sugary treat it looks like? Not as much as you'd think, since most of what you see is just air). If I had split that day's cotton candy purchase among my three children, it would have been less sugar per child than giving them each a CapriSun.


Of course, how much sugar you're eating does depend on how much cotton candy you buy. My next cotton candy purchase, which had several skeins of cotton candy stuffed into a plastic bag, weighed nearly half a pound (we hurried to a nearby grocery store to find out). We only ate handfuls of that one, and experimented with the rest.

Honey Candy Oh's

I never checked the label for Honey Graham Oh's during my Find Hidden Candy searches, but I should have.

With 12 grams of sugar per 27 g serving, this cereal is 44% sugar! That's as much sugar as a roll of Smarties and a mint Lifesaver.

"Great taste of graham" and "real golden honey?" Even the advertisers aren't trying that hard to make it sound healthy. Note that they don't say "great taste of sugar and high fructose corn syrup," although that's where most of the sweet taste comes from.