[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] What types of treats can you put into a cotton-candy machine
to make your own custom flavors of cotton candy?
In today's video, we're going to try and find out.
[Music]
We've got ourselves a little home-sized cotton-candy machine,
and we want to test this out.
The packaging tells us that we can actually use
different kinds of candy to put directly into our cotton-candy machine
to have different flavors when we're finished,
and we want to test that out.
We want to see which ones work,
which ones don't work,
and if we can use homemade candy,
that way, we can choose whatever flavor we want.
Here's the basic idea.
We'll first make a batch of cotton candy using a pre-made sugar
that's designed for this use.
We'll then compare that to regular white sugar
and a variety of different candies.
We'll also try our homemade candy recipe,
and maybe even see if we can get
some cotton candy that glows under a black light.
To start out, let's use the pre-made cotton-candy sugar
that you can buy at party stores,
and see what a normal batch of cotton candy should look like
so we can compare that to other batches later.
I'm turning it on and letting it spin, because it doesn't heat up
until you hit the switch, and the one switch does everything.
So, we're going to let this get warm, and then we're going to add
about a tablespoon of our candy floss pre-made sugar
into the dish and see what we get.
How cotton candy machines work is the sugar goes into the little hopper,
there's a heat source, usually, below it,
and the heat actually just melt the sugar.
Once the sugar is melted, it's thrown out of the sides of the machine.
Usually, through very small holes or a very thin gap,
and the liquid sugar is so thin that it cools down,
like, immediately as it leaves the hopper,
and so, it just forms into these super, super fine threads.
And those just get thrown out to the side,
and they stick to the walls, and you use the cone to gather them up,
and you eat.
There, we've got some wisps showing up.
[Music]
It very much just looks like there's a lot of busy spiders in there
that are just building webs really quick.
You can't really see the threads as they get thrown out.
They just sort of look like they're appearing all of a sudden.
I think the machine has just about run its course with the sugar we put in there.
So, here we have sort of the standard by which we'll compare other things.
This is interesting.
We've just got candy fibers floating through the air all over the place.
That's what happens if you use the pre-made floss sugar
that's just designed for making cotton candy.
It looks pretty much just like what you might think of
if you've ever had cotton candy at a carnival or a party or anything like that.
[Music]
It tastes pretty much the same.
And, of course, one of the hallmarks of cotton candy
is that it dissolves pretty much instantly
once you put in your mouth.
[Music]
So now, let's start trying some other things to see how close they are to this.
Next up, let's see what happens if we just take regular granulated sugar
and add that to the machine.
Last time, I used a full tablespoon.
But in the end, some of it got sprayed out,
and some of it didn't seem like it wanted to melt very well.
So, I'm just going to start with a little less than a tablespoon.
[Music]
Using regular white granulated sugar,
here's our result.
I gotta say my first impression is that this works pretty well.
I just poured the sugar in after I'd let it heat up for a bit.
It spun out.
It looks just as light and fluffy.
Of course, this is just white, rather than the pink,
because we didn't have any coloring in it.
But to me, that looks pretty much just the same, except for the color.
Of course, this one tastes more just like sugar,
instead of the vanilla flavor that our pink stuff had.
It seems to dissolve pretty much the same way in my mouth.
Let's try putting it in the water.
Yep, that looks the same.
Just dissolved right through.
Let's try one of our hard candy types.
These are just little butterscotch discs.
And I'm going to take maybe a couple of these.
And I don't want to just put the candy in there,
just because I think they probably won't end up
perfectly balanced across from each other.
And this is sort of gyroscopic,
so, I don't want to unbalance it.
So, I'm going to take these candies,
and break them up into a little bit of a powder.
[Music]
Well, there were some snafus in that process.
For some reason, it kept getting caught on the center,
and it would just grab all the floss, and pull it in and like bind up.
I was getting these weird long strands and clumps of this stuff,
rather than just getting the light fluffy webbing texture
that we're normally looking for.
But we did get some decent cotton textured candy out of this.
It's pretty fluffy. It smells like butterscotch.
Let's give it a taste.
[Music]
It taste like butterscotch too.
The texture is a little bit different.
It seems like it's a little bit thicker, coarser,
not quite as fine strands maybe.
Still pretty good, though.
So, these butterscotch candies, I would say, definitely work.
Let's see how well this dissolves in water.
Pretty similar.
Maybe just a little bit slower, but nothing major.
I have never had butterscotch-flavored cotton candy before,
so, I kind of like this.
This is enjoyable.
I thought there would be more color to it too.
These were very golden colored going in.
Coming out, you can see they've lost most of it.
There's still a little bit of the yellowy-orange color.
Compared to the normal white sugar.
It is more colored, but not as much as I thought it would be.
[Music]
Let's try something a little different.
Let's try Jolly Ranchers.
Let's try and make pineapple-orange cotton candy.
Well, once again, we had the issue
where it started by binding up a lot in the middle,
and we were getting these weird strands.
It might just be that I'm not letting it heat up enough
before we start adding the sugar.
In the end, we did start getting the nice fluffy texture that we were looking for.
So, this is made of two different flavors of Jolly Rancher, orange and pineapple.
[Music]
It's got a lot of flavor.
This is very strongly-flavored cotton candy.
I really like that.
[Music]
Before it was getting the good fluffy texture,
we were getting these dense kind of rope pieces.
Let's try taking some of the thread ropes and putting that into the water.
Those definitely dissolved slower.
Next up, let's give Life Savers a try.
Now, all of the candy we've done so far has pretty much discolored,
to the point where it's almost white.
So I'm going to try using a couple of the really dark-colored Life Savers,
and see how that works out.
We've got grape and raspberry here.
I don't really know if grape-raspberry is a good combination flavor-wise,
but we'll still see if it works,
and we'll see if it keeps the color anymore.
Oh yeah!
I'm pretty convinced I just wasn't letting it get hot enough
with the other ones,
because this one, I let it run for a lot longer.
I put it in, and it almost immediately started
throwing out the threads looking just the way we want it to,
not binding into the middle.
Pretty sure that's the key.
Give it more time to heat up.
Also, wow!
That seems to turn all to threads really quickly,
like, even more than the pre-made sugar stuff.
Cotton candy made out of Life Savers.
It melted down really well.
It seems to be a good fluffy cotton texture.
[Music]
Wow!
And really intense on the flavor.
[Music]
There is a lot of flavor on that.
Let's try a dissolving test.
Pretty much instant-dissolving.
Next, I've got this giant slab of candy.
And if you've seen our video on how to make thumb suckers,
or casting a Pokeball using candy,
this is the same recipe we used for that.
It's made of sugar, corn syrup, water, a little bit of color,
and a little bit of flavor.
I want to try breaking this up into fine granules,
and see if it will work in our cotton-candy machine,
because if it does,
it means we can choose the color and the flavor
of whatever we put in here.
This one's peach.
It's the weirdest-shaped lollipop ever.
There's no stick.
You just hold on to a different part of the lollipop.
[Music]
It's working. It's working.
Okay, so, that worked surprisingly well.
I think we got quite a bit more volume on this
than we did with some of the others,
like the Life Savers or the Jolly Ranchers.
Not as much volume as the pre-made candy sugar stuff.
But ... it's good and fluffy.
Let's give it a taste.
This had quite a bit of strong peach flavor when I was licking it at as a weird lollipop.
Let's see how it is.
[Music]
Ooh! That is nice and peachy.
Comparison of the colors: it really took out a lot of the color.
Now, in the past, we've actually made some candy that glowed
under a blacklight by adding in some vitamin B2, or riboflavin.
I want to see if we can replicate that glow
in the fluffy, cottony texture of our cotton candy.
So, we're going to take some Life Savers,
crush them down, add in some crushed-in vitamin B2,
and see if it's a fine enough powder that it can bond to the sugar,
and really make some glowing cotton candy.
[Music]
Ooh.
Random fact: machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897
by the dentist William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton,
and first introduced to a wide audience at the 1904 World's Fair as "Fairy Floss."
Our vitamin B2 glowing cotton candy.
This is glowing under a black light because the riboflavin
was in such a fine powder that it was actually able to be carried
and mixed in evenly with all of the spun sugar.
It's a pretty cool effect.
I do have to say, if you're trying this,
you want to be really careful about your balance
between the sugar and the riboflavin,
because it does have kind of a bitter taste.
So, if you have too much of it,
your cotton candy will end up tasting bitter.
So, you want to just barely have enough
that it starts showing up under the black light.
Otherwise, it's not going to taste great.
Lots of types of hard candy work in this machine,
including making our own hard candy.
Adding a little bit of vitamin B2 can actually make the cotton candy
start to glow under a blacklight.
If there's anything else you would like to see us try,
let us know, and maybe we'll give it a shot.
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