11 Favorite Candy Experiments

Do you need a fun way for kids to celebrate Halloween and learn science? If so, try some of these candy science experiments to get your candy bubbling, spouting, sparking, sinking, and separating!

Here’s a list of eleven favorite candy experiments from all over the internet.

1. Sour Candy Bubble Test

Sour candy contains acid, which causes the sour taste. With the Acid Test candy experiment, You can test for the acid by dissolving the candy and adding baking soda to make a bubbling reaction.

You can do this with any type of candy, but it’s especially fun with Pixy Stix and Warheads!

2. Floating M&Ms

Need a Halloween magic trick? Drop some M&M’s in a glass of water and watch the letters. In a few minutes, the M’s will start floating!

3. Marshmallow Sink

Can you sink a marshmallow? Take the Marshmallow Challenge to find out!

A marshmallow contains tiny air bubbles, which puff it out to make it less dense than water. To make it sink, you must make the marshmallow denser than water by making it smaller. Smash the marshmallow to break the air bubbles, then roll it into a ball. If you make it small enough, it will sink.

4. Life Saver Lights

For this experiment, which the Exploratorium calls “Lighting In Your Mouth,” you need a dark room, a mirror, and a pack of wintergreen LifeSavers. Stand in front of the mirror and start chewing the LifeSavers. You will see sparks of light as the energy from the chewing motion rips electrons off of the sugar molecules, then recombines them to release flashes of light.

This also works with other wintergreen sugar candies, such as Altoids.

5. Candy Color Separation

Chromatography lets you separate candy colors so you can see what dyes have been mixed together.

To do chromatography, cut a strip of paper from a coffee filter. Wet a colored candy, such as a brown M&M, and dab a spot of color near the bottom of the paper. Stand up the paper up in glass with a half-inch of water, and watch as the colors rise up the paper.

6. Chocolate Bloom

When chocolate blooms, the cocoa butter begins to separate from the cocoa solids. Eventually the cocoa butter can form complex patterns of white crystals.

7. Dancing Gummy Frankenworms

For the Dancing Gummy Frankenworms experiment, you can make gummy worms dance by slicing them into strips, soaking them in baking soda water, then dropping them in vinegar. The bubbles will hold the pieces up so they dance!

8. Giant Gummies

Make your gummy worms grow to double their length with the Giant Gummies experiment. Just put them in water and wait for two days to see how big they get.

9. Bubbling Pop Rocks

To find the secret ingredient in Pop Rocks, put them in water and watch what happens. As the candy dissolves, it releases tiny trapped air bubbles that float to the surface.

10. Melting Races

If you really want to see what your candy is made of, cover a cookie sheet with aluminum foil, line up different types of candy, and heat in the oven at 300 degrees to see what happens. For instance, you’ll see oil spots form on Starbursts, candy bars melt away from their fillings, and taffy turn translucent as the air bubbles contained inside rise to the surface and disappear.

11. Mentos Coke Geyser

One of the internet’s favorite candy experiments, the Mentos Coke geyser lets you send coke spouting into the air. Try it with Diet Coke, and wear clothes that can get wet!

For more fun ideas on how to experiment with candy, check out the candyexperiments.com experiments page!

Hershey Chocolate Sawdust

A long, long time ago, I microwaved some Hershey bars so that I could demonstrate chocolate bloom at a school visit. The chocolate bars developed lovely circular chocolate bloom structures, which I passed around the classroom to make the students goggle.


Then I put them on the fridge and forgot about them. Little did I know I was conducting a brand-new candy experiment!

When I finally took the plate down a year and a half later, this is what I found:
The chocolate had bloomed so much it had crumbled to pieces, like chocolate sawdust. (If you don't believe it's actually chocolate, look for the Hershey's logo on the bar on the upper right.)

All that was left of each bar was a pile of powder, which I was able to spoon up without any trouble at all.

The Step-counting Choc-o-meter

You deserve chocolate! That's the premise of the step-counting Choc-O-Meter we saw in the hospital gift shop. According to the packaging, 4000 steps gets you one chocolate bar. They don't say how many calories you burn in your 4000 steps, and have neglected to mention the size of the chocolate bar you've earned, which I'd think would be important information. The calculators at gearedtobefit.com tell me that my 4000 steps will only burn 96 calories, less than a quarter of the calories in my Theo's 3 oz chocolate bar of choice.

Still, this product is a good way to make us think about the relationship between the food we eat and the calories we burn. If more Americans understood how long it takes to burn off excess calories, we might be able to tackle this nationwide obesity problem.

More about Cocoa Butter Decorations

We just finished a super-long car trip through Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota.  I didn't get to tour the Sweet's candy factory in Salt Lake (another time!), but we did visit the La Chatelaine shop in Bozeman, Montana.  Racking our brains and trying to remember what city they were in, we were lucky enough to look them up after we'd finished our lunch in Bozeman, or we would have missed our chance.

Not only did we buy a box of gorgeous truffles, but the saleslady explained how they created the cocoa butter decorations. She told me that the patterns come pre-printed on sheets of plastic, which are applied to the truffles as they come out of the enrobing machine, still warm.  It made me wonder if I could warm the truffles up and use tissue paper to lift the patterns off, but I'm not sure I want to try.  Halloween candy is fair game for experimentation, but gourmet truffles are another matter.

Cocoa Butter

You might think that since chocolate bloom degrades the quality of a chocolate bar, cocoa butter on chocolate's surface is a bad thing.  Think again.

Cocoa butter covers the surface of many gourmet chocolates.  That's because the decorations are made with cocoa butter.  We learned this at the recent Seattle Chocolate Salon, where vendors handed out samples of their wares to try.  Many also spared a few minutes to answer questions from a curious candy experimenter.

The creators of La Chatelaine chocolate explained to me how the cocoa butter was dyed and applied to decorate their truffles.  Cocoa butter coating doesn't degrade the taste at all--it was a real test of will to save these truffles for photographs before I could eat them.  They taste as good as they look.

Amano Chocolate also had gorgeous truffles.

Apologies to the vendors whose wares I couldn't feature--I couldn't afford a box from everybody!
Maybe next year.

Chocolate Bloom

Last week I decided to revisit the Chocolate Bloom experiment.  A chocolatier at Oh! Chocolate gave me a tip: if my melted chocolate bars aren't blooming, stir them with a pretzel or something.  Without proper tempering, the stirred chocolate should quickly bloom.

So, last Wednesday, I liquified Hershey bars in the microwave, in the oven, and with a hair dryer, and dipped nearly a pack of pretzel sticks.  At the end of the day there was no bloom anywhere.  I decided to give up and start eating the pretzels.

But the bloom had gotten started, all right.  By Friday, my chocolate bars were getting speckled.  By today, they were spectacular.

These Hershey bars were melted twice in the microwave, then left in the kitchen window for a week.  The bars on the left, which had been stirred, definitely bloomed.  But so did the unstirred bars on the right.  (Top: milk chocolate, bottom: Special Dark.)

This one was my favorite: it looks as if it had turned inside-out.

And what about those pretzels? By today, the uneaten survivors had bloomed too.

The lesson? If you're trying to create chocolate bloom, be patient.  It might take a few days for the process to really work.

Cacao: Chocolate in Infancy

My recent trip to Costa Rica showed me wonders I never thought I'd see in real life: wild parrots, foraging monkeys, and a river full of crocodiles.  But the most exciting sight to a candy experimenter's eyes?  A real life cacao tree.


Cacao flowers grow on the branches and trunk of the cacao tree throughout the year.* We spotted two tiny flowers sprouting from the main trunk well above our heads.

The flowers become pods, which take 5-6 months to grow to full size and mature.* We could only see one empty pod on our tree, chewed through by a foraging animal.

The beans from this cacao tree are far removed from the chocolate in my gourmet bar.  After harvest, cacao beans must be fermented, dried, cleaned, roasted, and ground before they start to approach what I know as chocolate.*  Furthermore, since this tree was located in Costa Rica's Las Pumas Rescue Center, its beans will never turn up in my chocolate blooming experiments.  Still, as I admired the tree, I felt as if I were greeting an old friend.

*See Stephen T Beckett, The Science of Chocolate, page 14
*See Stephen T Beckett, The Science of Chocolate, chapters 2-3