Making your own rock candy is a fun and tasty way to grow crystals and see the structure of sugar on a big scale.
Rock candy crystals recipe.
Crystals will begin to form in a few hours the next day remove the cord from the jar pour the sugar liquid back into the saucepan reheat and cool it just as you did before.
This is a really great science experiment to do at home.
A seed crystal isn t necessary as long as you re using a rough string or yarn.
Of course when you leave sugar water out it feeds bacteria just like if you would leave meat out.
Better yet it doubles as a science experiment because you get to watch the sugar crystals grow.
Sugar crystals or rock candy as it s often called is really easy to make fun to watch grow and best of all it s delicious.
Tie the string to a pencil or butter knife.
Rock candy is easy to make at home it tastes great and it s a fun recipe to do with kids.
You might want to grow a seed crystal a small crystal to weight your string and provide a surface for larger crystals to grow on.
You only need a few common kitchen materials for this crystal project.
3 cups sugar sucrose.
Sugar sucrose crystals are one of the few types of crystals you can grow and eat.
Candy and crystals both make me happy and putting them together in the same project is even better.
That means you should have more sugar than water not equal amounts of both.
Large sugar crystals on lollipop sticks otherwise known as rock candy is a fun experiment to make at home with the kids.
If you don t boil the rock candy mixture long enough the crystals will take a lot longer to form up to three weeks or more.
Recipe annotations will appear in a new window table sugar crystals magnified 100 times.
Rock candy crystals magnified 250 times.
Rock candy is supposed to be a supersaturated solution when you mix the sugar and water together.
Better yet it doubles as a science experiment because you get to watch the sugar crystals grow.
You can eat the natural clear crystals or you can color and flavor them.
If you ve made this recipe and it s been a week and no crystals have formed try pouring the mixture back into a saucepan and boiling for a few minutes more.
This recipe is for rock candy that you can eat.
More crystals will form.
You don t need many ingredients but you will need some patience as they take a few days to form.
Notice that the shapes of the rock candy crystals are very similar to those of the sugar crystals.
How to grow rock candy.
That s because rock candy is made up of many sugar crystals that have grown together.
Sugar crystals are called rock candy because these hard crystals are edible.
Pour the liquid back into the jar and reinsert the cord with the crystals into it.