Candy Experiments

Candy Experiments
by Loralee Leavitt
Issue 162, September-October 2010

I loved candy when I was a kid, but when I became a mother, I worried about my kids eating too much of the stuff. Still, I’ve never banned it from our home. Now, when my children come home on Halloween night, examine their candy, and go to bed without asking to eat a single piece, it’s not because I’ve forbidden it. It’s because they have better ideas about what 
to do with it.

It began with a simple question three years ago, when I was overwhelmed by our collection of Halloween candy. An afternoon with too-generous coworkers, a church Trunk-or-Treat (i.e., collecting candy at every car in a full parking lot), and a subsequent trick-or-treating expedition up our street had provided my four-year-old princess and two-year-old cowboy with mountains of candy. But since the candies had been the gifts of kind friends, and of elderly neighbors on fixed incomes, I didn’t want to throw them all away. Instead, I decided to dole them out one piece at a time. Handing out pieces after lunch was painful—the bowl loomed enormous atop my fridge, and I knew that at this rate we’d be eating candy for months.

Then, as my daughter Katherine poured out a box of Nerds, she asked the life-changing question:    

“What would happen if I put these in water?”

I almost missed the moment. I was cleaning up the lunch dishes, and didn’t want to get out another one. Besides, the experiment sounded messy and wasteful (even though I’d just been agonizing about how to get rid of the stuff). I brushed her question aside, hoping she’d forget it. Instead, she asked again. I got her a white, unspillable mug, filled it with water, and set it down in front of her. She poured in her strawberry Nerds, examined them, stirred them into something the color of raspberry lemonade, and examined the cup again. Then I dumped 
it down the sink.

That was our first candy experiment.

I was ready to let the idea die, but a few days later Katherine asked again. I tried again to brush her aside, but she insisted. So I pulled out three sturdy white mugs, unspillable, unbreakable, made for easy candy viewing. Three experiments, I thought, would be enough for one day. Then, finally, I realized what an opportunity I was about to waste—and rushed back to the dish cupboard.

Before long, the table had disappeared under bowls, cups, glasses, mugs, ramekins, pie tins, and anything else that held water. Katherine and Alex were dissolving candy as fast as they could unwrap it, as our kitchen became a chemistry lab. We’d begun our candy adventure.

I’ve always loved science. I fell in love with chemistry at summer camp in eighth grade, where we made crystals, tested pH, learned about the periodic table, and watched our professor light up the lecture room with glowing concoctions. I studied more chemistry in high school, and minored in physics in college. I’d always meant to pass on that love of science to my children with visits to museums, studies of backyard insects, and by building paper airplanes, growing seeds, and mixing kitchen chemicals. But those ambitions had been buried by mom stuff: dishes, driving, chasing after kids. When Katherine began dropping candy in water bowls, all those dreams came flooding back. Here was my chance.

I took it. “Do you think candy dissolves faster in hot water or in cold water?” I asked. “Let’s find out.”

I poured bowls of hot and cold and we experimented. Since they were dumping everything in the water, we learned pretty fast which candies sank and which floated. “Why do Three Musketeers bars float?” I asked. We opened one up and saw the air bubbles. “Does licorice dissolve?” We tried, but after days of waiting, fragments of licorice still drifted in the water. 
I pointed out the flour in the list of ingredients. “Can we mix colors?” We dissolved blue and yellow candies in the same bowl, stirred, and watched the solution turn green. We weighed out candy to match the sugar content listed on packages, and learned that one carton of fruit yogurt contained as much sugar as a small pack of Skittles and a pack of Smarties. We were covering temperature, density, dissolving, color, and nutrition—and having a great time!

While I knew what to expect from a hot/cold test, some discoveries astonished all of us. In our test of M&Ms, tiny m’s floated to the surface of the water. Submerged Yogos cracked open like dinosaur eggs, shedding little bits of white shell. Smarties took hours to dissolve. Marshmallows didn’t dissolve at all, even when we let them float for days. Katherine even managed to mix strawberry and grape Nerds to create a solution the color of my grandmother’s plum punch.