The Rock Candy Experiment

Taken Monday evening (10/22)

I'm not sure where JD saw this, but he's been asking about making rock candy. I've seen it on Pinterest and maybe it was in one of his Highlights for Kids magazines. We finally got everythig together on Monday night to make the syrup and start the candy.

We used:
2 cups of water
4 cups of sugar
gel food coloring
4 bambo skewers
chip clips
funnel
mason jars

Making the syrup took the longest, because you have to add each cup of sugar and dissove it completely before adding the next. I read several sets of directions about cooking the syrup and some said to remove from the heat as soon as all the sugar was added and some sid to boil it for 5-10 minutes. I did let it boil for a few minutes after the sugar dissolved, but didn't want to get the temp too high since we weren't making hard candy. You can add flavoring to the syrup too, but JD decided we should leave it plain.

While we waited a bit for the syrup to cool, I wet 3 of the skewers with water and rolled them in sugar and set them aside to dry. The 4th skewer I dipped into the syrup and rolled in sugar instead. You need to do this to give the sugar crystals something to start growing on. We used a funnel to put the syrup into clean mason jars and then added the coloring. I used chip clips to suspend the skewers so they don't touch the sides or the bottom of the jars.

This morning the yellow, blue and green syrups seem to be doing well. You can see the crystal build up on the skewers. The red isn't working so well. Not sure if it's because we used a different type of food coloring or if it's because it's the skewer that was dipped in syrup and then the sugar and not the water and sugar.

We'll keep checking and I'll post a photo when we're done. The photo at the top is of  our jars after we were finished setting them up. Hope we get some good candy sticks from this. JD will be very excited!

Yellow jar - Friday morning

Finished Rock Candy