When we went on vacation to the beach, I took an afternoon to pound away at the candy experiments book. One experiment was on dissolving chocolate, so I pulled out some of the glasses in the cabin, filled them up, and dropped in chocolate pieces:
Here's something this teetotaler never knew before: some shot glasses are so narrow you can't fit a spoon down inside to scoop out a piece of chocolate! (Luckily this was a well-stocked cabin: I soon turned up something like a pickle fork that worked just fine.)
This photo is of one of the chocolate experiments, with tiny fragments of chocolate dissolving at the bottom.
Candyexperiments.com was just featured in a newsletter by homeschooling-ideas.com. Besides the blurb for candy experiments, there's also a great (and short!) animation of a black hole swallowing a star, sidewalk chalk art that's unbelieveably realistic, and a scrapbook with a picture of a medieval undercroft I'm sure I've visited. What fun!
Thanks for the interest.
All that experimentation floating candy in soda got me thinking: can we test how soda floats? The perfect opportunity presented itself at my husband's work party, where we found a tub full of choices. I held up one can of regular Coke, and one can of diet, and released them at the water's surface. Diet Coke bobbed away, while the regular Coke sank to the bottom.
This was so fun I tried it with many kinds of soda, and only stopped when I couldn't feel my cold fingers anymore!
NPR's comedy show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" just covered a story about using candy to help people. Apparently cops in Canada now hand out lollipops to calm drunks.
Hear more about it at the Wait Wait website, in the show from July 23.
With 13 kids to entertain, a sunny summer afternoon, and a handy picnic table, it was time for candy experiments!
Ingredients for a successful outdoor session
* washable table
* large bucket of water (you won't want to be running to the tap all the time)
* small pitcher you can refill from the bucket
o for filling cups
o for washing sticky hands
* disposable cups (I recommend clear plastic because you can see through the sides as well as the top)
* bowl of baking soda, with more inside for easy refills
* spoons for soda and for stirring
* sunscreen
* small bowls for candy dispensing (no need to get out all the M&M's; using Minis, we only went through less than 1/2 a cup)
* seltzer water, because kids like watching all the bubbles when they put in the candy
* garbage container or sack (You'll generate a lot of wrappers)
* paper towels
Good candy
* M&Ms for color mixing
* Warheads for acid test
* Nerds for acid test, for bright colors, for looking for sugar crystals in middle
* Taffy, Tootsie Rolls for boat-making
Favorites:
As always, testing for acid was a huge hit, especially when we tried Warheads, Nerds, and Lemonheads (remember to let Lemonheads dissolve for a few minutes before adding soda).
We also competed to see who could shape taffy into boats that would float. Most boats sank quickly, but a few winners stayed up for several seconds. An 8-year-old girl was our champion, stretching several boats of Tootsie Roll (one of her secrets was to use at least two pieces), and a 5-year-old girl won for the longest time with a taffy boat. To make a taffy boat, mold your taffy into a bowl shape, and be sure not to poke holes in the bottom.
Diverting kids with a few bottles of bubble solution might have been be cheaper, cleaner, and a lot less work. But the kids had a great time (some played with candy for over an hour and a half!), and learned some science, and the candy experiments sure added a splash of color to an otherwise low-key afternoon.
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.
