Rock Candy

Thursday last week Aaron had to work late.  It is much easier for me to keep Michael home than to try and haul both girls into his daycare to get him.  The hard part of keeping him home is managing his mischief while I deal with the girls.  You can't imagine how much a three year old can get into while you're feeding twins.  So he and I made a deal, you behave while I'm feeding/changing/dressing the girls and you and I will make candy before we eat lunch.  If you know my child, you know he's pretty motivated by candy I hate to say.

I know this can be used as a good science experiment where you can discuss the formation of crystals.  That's a little over Michael's head.  Instead it turned into a lesson in patience since he had to wait until today to remove it from the liquid.  He's also having to wait for it to dry.  (That was my decision and not part of the process.)  I did this before I really thought through the blog idea.  There are no pictures of us doing this.  The next time we do it I'll be sure to snap some photos.

I initially found this idea on Pinterest.  You can find the original recipe here.

Rock Candy:


1 cup of water
2-3 cups sugar
food coloring (optional)
clothes pin
wooden skewer
tall, skinny glass

First you need to insert your skewer in the cup and mark with the clothes pin where it will be approximately 1 inch from the bottom of the glass and not touching the sides of the glass.  Remove the skewer.  Bring the cup of water to a boil.  Add the sugar in 1/4 cup intervals, storing until the sugar completely dissolves.  (I made Michael help me count.)  Continue adding the sugar until no more can be dissolved.  Pull your pan off the heat and let cool for 20 minutes.  If you desire to color your sugar, now is the time to do it.  Be sure you make it pretty dark in color.  After it has cooled, pour the sugar mixture in the glass.  Place the skewer, now held by the clothespin, into the sugar mixture.  Now you wait.  It takes 3-7 days for the crystals to form.  You can accelerate the process by dipping your skewer into the liquid when it's hot and then roll it into plain sugar.  Be sure the skewer is completely cooled before you put it into the glass if you do this.

We had crystals forming the next day.  The longer you wait, the bigger your crystals will be.  There was no way we could make him wait any longer to get bigger crystals than we did.  The next time I do this I want to play around with adding flavoring into it so you don't taste just plain sugar.  If anyone has any advice on how to do that, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Enjoy!!