Easter Chocolate Pudding Chromatography

Mixing up some boxed chocolate pudding for my daughter's birthday party, I committed the same mistake as Matthew McConaughey in The Wedding Planner talking about brown M&M's--assuming that because it was chocolate, and that it was brown, that the brown color was all chocolate. (When we make chocolate pudding from scratch, with real chocolate, it's brown!) But a glance at the box told me otherwise--just like the coating on brown M&M's, Jell-O chocolate pudding has red, yellow, and blue food dye.


Naturally, I had to go looking for the dye. I wish I'd done the experiment before I mixed the pudding--diluting the pudding with milk made the colors harder to see. But I did get some color separation.
I don't know why I didn't see any blue. Maybe because the pudding was mixed with milk by the time I thought to test it, diluting the colors? Or maybe there just wasn't very much. There isn't much blue in M&M's.

We went ahead and used the chocolate pudding for my daughter's birthday party, turning "chocolate dirt pudding pots" with gummi worms and cookie crumbs into Easter egg hunting treats.

But my kids ended up not liking the pudding. Guess they're too used to the real thing.

USASEF 2012

Well, we made it to and through the USA Science and Engineering Festival once again. As before, kids played the "Marshmallow Game," in which they tried to sink marshmallows by squashing them to learn about density, showed all the colors that make up M&M brown, demonstrated how sour Warheads bubble when dropped in baking soda water, and let kids weigh candy to find the hidden candy in their other foods. Good moments:

--Every time a child stared at the 10 rolls of Smarties that match the sugar contents of one bottle of orange soda

--The kids who were so interested in their chromatography papers that they took them home

--Every time a parent read our blinding orange sign to their kids, so we didn't have to waste our voices repeating the message: "The candy is for experiments, not for eating!"

--The mother who learned that brown M&Ms actually contain red dye, when she'd always told her dye-sensitive children that brown was all right because it was made of chocolate

--Watching my family members, as well as a bunch of super volunteers, step up to demonstrate these exciting experiments.

This picture gives you only a small idea of just how big the convention center was. We were near the back of the room, nearly halfway down, so there were almost as many booths stretching out on the other side from us as well. One report said that USASEF attracted so many people, it made the second biggest crowd ever to fill the convention center. I'll believe it--it was very crowded!

Everybody joined in the fun--family members, friends, and even my kids. For awhile, my four-year-old was the only person manning the Sink a Marshmallow station. She had the basics exactly right: Squash the marshmallow enough to sink it; if you sink it, you get to try a big marshmallow.

I also found some new candy experiments as I was wandering around. Check back for details!

Easter Egg Chromatography

It was just a way to keep the eggs from rolling around the baking sheet, while containing the color. But, when I set my newly dyed green Easter Egg onto a paper towel, I accidentally started the process of chromatography.

For chromatography, you need two things:
1) fibers, such as in a paper towel or coffee filter, to transmit the liquid
2) moving liquid, such as water, which dissolves the dyes and carries them through the paper.
Apparently, the water running down off of the egg and soaking the paper towel was enough to push the dyes further away from the egg, and start the colors separating.

Notice the ring of beautiful blue around the green dye. There are also spots of yellow in the middle of the green, which at first I thought must have dripped from a yellow egg, but turn out to be the yellow dye remaining after the blue dye is separated out. (I repeated the experiment, keeping yellow eggs far away, just to make sure.)

I also noticed this effect with blue, which separated slightly so that one patch of blue was a little darker violet, but it didn't photograph well.

Chemistry of egg dyeing

As part of the USA Science and Engineering Festival, chemistry professor Diane Bunce is going to explain the chemistry behind egg dying. If you can't make it, read this article for a sneak peek, and learn why you need vinegar in egg dye.

Holiday Experiments: Oldies but Goodies

I just saw that my guest blog post for sensationalhomeschooling.com last year was reposted at the blog Our Journey Through Autism. I wrote about chromatography and melting candy canes. Since the blog post became unavailable soon after I published it, it's fun to see it up again.

Last year I posted these really fun candy cane experiments:
-Candy Cane Countdown #3: Bubbling Candy Canes
-Candy Cane Countdown #2: Mutant Candy Canes
-Candy Cane Countdown #1: Rubber Bandy Canes

The Rubber Bandy Canes were one of my favorite experiments ever, and I just bought two boxes of Bob's candy canes so we can do them again. Maybe this year we'll even be able to hollow some out.

Leaf chromatography experiment

There's no candy involved, but Scientific American has a great chromatography experiment with autumn leaves. It takes a little while longer than M&M chromatography, so be prepared.