Candy Baby!

Today is a sad day for Olivia…her sisters went back to school! This it seems, is highly inconvenient for my little mite and she has been trawling the house calling for her sisters {insert broken heart here*} all morning!

The benefits for a third child is that there are always playmates close at hand – this school thing really does put a spanner in the works though, but I’m sure come pick up time and when her sisters burst through the front door, Livie is going to be the happiest little camper again to have her rowdy sisters back to entertain/ annoy / cuddle and control her!

Anyway – I thought I’d share one of our holiday activities with you today…we made Rock candy!

Kayla has been rather obsessed with a crystal making set she got for her birthday, but it is all very complicated and seldom the outcome she was hoping for results! So to restore her confidence in science (whatever) I decided to teach her and Iz how to make rock candy and it was surprisingly easy and yummy!

We googled it of course , took all the advice given and this is what worked best for us!

You will need:
Sugar (loads of sugar, we had to go and buy another bag!)
Water
Food Colouring gel (I used the Woolworth’s natural ones)
Wooden Skewers
Jars or Glass Cups (tall and thin)
Clothespegs

Step one:
Trim down your skewers to a reasonable size to fit in whatever glass that you will be using also remove the pointed tips. Dip them in water, and then roll in sugar. Set them aside to dry completely and continue with the sugar mixture. This gives the sugar a base, something to adhere to when it starts to crystallize.

Step two:

Mix equal parts of water and sugar in a pot on med-high heat on the stove until dissolved. Then continue to add sugar until you have a 3:1 ratio. It will get to a point where it won't dissolve anymore. To check that your sugar is dissolving, coat the back of a metal spoon with the syrup and make sure that it is smooth with no grains.. We used 6cups of water and 18 cups of sugar and it made 6 glasses of syrup, but you can definitely half the recipe if you like. We wanted a lot of colours though so stuck with these quantities.  The idea is to make nice, sticky, syrup. Mix until mixture starts to simmer. Easy peasy!




Step three:
Remove the mixture from the stove and allow your syrup to cool for 10 -15 minutes or so and ladle into your glasses. It is still pretty hot at this point so take care. Using the the tips that we trimmed off of our skewers we dipped them into concentrated food colouring gel, then swirled the skewer into our hot syrup mixture. You can use liquid food colouring, but I like the gel better.

Step four:
Attach two clothes pegs to each skewer (the ones you dipped in sugar and let dry) and balance in the middle of the glass. Make sure the skewer isn't touching the bottom or sides of glass. They need room to grow. Since our glasses were narrow, we only used one skewer but I’m sure in a wider glass you could add more!?

Step Five:
Place your glasses in a warm location with lots of natural light. Here they are on day one (above pic)...you can see that there is a bit of sugar build up from when we dipped them in water and then let them dry in sugar as well as a bit on the bottom of the glass. Another tip is to pop something over the top so nothing falls into the mixture to taint it. (I used coffee filters). The pictures below were taken on day 5...the girls were tempted to call it a day here, but we persisted...or rather I insisted we persisted;)

Step six:
Wait and watch them grow for about 7 days and Voila! How pretty are these??? Remember that the actual crystals will be much lighter in colour than the syrup which suits me fine...pretty pastel crystals result!

 We had a great time watching them grow and sampling the finished product. I think to the kids it seemed like a month not just 7 days but they managed and trying them out was worth the wait!

*There will be crystallized sugar in the bottom of your glasses. Just run them in hot water and chip it out with a butter knife. It comes out pretty easily.*

So that’s that - Rock Candy Tutorial = such fun and great to teach the kids a bit of science AND patience it seemed! ;)

Let me know how yours turns out?