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Anne Marie's Chemistry Blog

By Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., About.com Guide to Chemistry since 2001

How to Flavor Rock Candy

Tuesday November 25, 2008
Rock Candy (Anne Helmenstine)
I've been trying out kits for educational toys, like slime and the chemical volcano, but one kit I just can't bring myself to buy-and-try is the rock candy kit. Why? It's around $12 and doesn't even come with the sugar... just a stick, container, and flavored food coloring. I can come up with a jar and popsicle stick to make my own rock candy and I suspect you can too. If you want flavoring, there are couple of ways to go. You can add a few drops of flavoring to your saturated sugar solution. These would be extracts or flavorings that you would buy in the spice section of a grocery store. You use these by adding food coloring and a couple of drops of flavoring to your crystal solution. Cherry, lemon, lime, orange, mint, and cinnamon all work well. Another option is to dissolve Kool-aid™ or other drink mix in the crystal growing solution to (intensely) flavor your rock candy.

If you have experience with the rock candy kit and think it's worth the money, let me know and I'll try it out, but I suspect you can save your pennies and get equally good or better results on your own.

Comments

September 29, 2009 at 11:27 am
(1) kiari says:

I think you’re right, I’m doing my science fair project on rock candy crystallization and I don’t think I need to spend that much on such an empty kit. Thank you for posting this before I could make a mistake like that. I hope you post more ways to flavor them, I love rock candy and would like some snacks for after I’m done with my experiment! :D

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