3-D printed candy: Your next Christmas gift?

For that really special candy-experimenter in your life...

You've heard of 3-D printing for plastic, toys, medical devices, and everything else. What about candy?

Check out these 3-D printed confections made by ChefJet! The $5000 printer allows you to print white sugar confections; for just $10,000, you can buy a printer with an injket head that injects food coloring into the mixture.

More Soda (bad) Health News

According to The Week, a long-term Swedish study reveals that "people with a daily soda habit may also be at higher risk for heart failure." In a study of 42,000 men over 45 followed for 12 years, "the subjects who drank more than two sweetened drinks every day had a 23 percent greater risk of developing heart failure."

"Soda Linked to Heart Failure," The Week, page 20

Does Sugar Curb Stress?

Do you overload on sugar when you're dealing with holiday stress? There might be a reason.

"Sugar may help curb stress, and that may keep us coming back for more. Researchers randomly assigned 19 women aged 18 to 40 to drink beverages (supplied by the study) three times a day with meals. About half got drinks that were sweetened with sucrose (table sugar), while half got drinks sweetened with aspartame. After two weeks, the participants were given a math test that’s designed to cause stress. After the test, the women who had been drinking the sugar-sweetened drinks had lower levels of cortisol (a hormone that’s secreted by the adrenal gland when people are stressed) than those who had been drinking the aspartame-sweetened beverages. All the women also had an MRI to measure activity in a part of the brain (the hippocampus) that gets inhibited by stress. On average, those who got the sugary drinks had a more active hippocampus than those who got the diet drinks, suggesting that they were less stressed. The results may explain why many people seek out sugary foods when they’re stressed. What should you do? When you’re stressed, think twice before you reach for sweets…or stop after just a few bites and go for a walk. There’s more than one way to deal with stress."

Why we keep coming back to sugar in drinks, from Nutrition Action Review

The Marshmallow Challenge: teamwork and engineering in action

My son's favorite school activity lately was The Marshmallow Challenge, as seen on Tom Wujec's website.  Each team had eighteen minutes to plan and build a tower with tape, 20 pieces of spaghetti, scissors, and a marshmallow to put on top. My son's group of four came up with their class's winning design: a spaghetti leg tripod with a single strand of spaghetti reaching up (like a camera tripod).

Color Changing Nerds

Eight years ago, my four year old wanted to put Nerds in water. We put them in water, they dissolved, the water turned purple, we threw it out, and Candy Experiments were born.

But we didn't know that there was more to learn! This Halloween we put purple Nerds in water, and left it a few days. As the dye decomposed, the water turned red!

A solution of purple Nerds in water (left) ends up fading to red after a few days (right)

Genes Affect Sweetness Perception

Is there such a thing as a sweet tooth? Maybe it's a sweet tongue. A recent study published in Twin Research and Human Genetics found that "about 30% of variations in sweet taste perception can be attributed to genetics," and that people who perceive sweet taste less strongly might therefore add more sugar when sweetening something like coffee or cereal.


Summarized in "Genes Affect Sweet Taste Percepetion," Tufts Health and Nutrition Letter Oct 2015, page 2

Best use of candy corn: Corn Bread or Candy Experiments?

Dominique Ansel, creator of the Cronut, suggests families use up leftover candy corn this way: cook it into cornbread! ( *"Cook with Leftover Candy!" Time Oct 27, 2014, page 81) All you need, apparently, is a standard cornbread recipe with 3 oz chopped candy corn, which dissolves into the batter when you refrigerate it overnight. Stir it the next day to mix the dye into the batter, and cook. Of course, if you do, you're still eating all of the sugar and dye you might have been trying to avoid.

Here's how we play with candy corn: "Skin the Candy" from Candy Experiments. Just drop your candy corn in warm water and watch the glaze peel off like snakeskin.