Homemade Rock Candy (2024)

FAQs

What is the ratio for rock candy solution? ›

🍭🍬 DIY ROCK CANDY! 🍭🍬 Ingredients: 4 cups water, 10 cups sugar (It's an approx 1:3 water sugar ratio), food coloring Equipment: 5 skewers, 5 mason jars, 5 clothes pins Instructions: - Wet your 5 skewers and coat them in sugar. Leave them to dry completely for at least an hour.

Sweets like Rock Candy are made through a process called crystallization. Sugar crystals form when you create a supersaturated solution of sugar and water — that just means there's more sugar than can be dissolved in the boiling water — and let it cool.

The hypothesis is that if sugar water is left to evaporate, sugar crystals will form on a string or stick, creating a rock candy treat.

The simple answer is that there is too much moisture in your candy.

No Crystal Growth

This is usually caused by using a solution that isn't saturated. The cure for this is to dissolve more solute into the liquid. Stirring and applying heat can help to get solute into the solution. Keep adding solute until you start to see some accumulate at the bottom of your container.

The 'trick' is to allow the solution to cool slowly because if a sugar solution cools very quickly it tends to become supersaturated. This means solutions that cool quickly will become highly concentrated rather than grow crystals.

If an impurity, food coloring, is added to the crystal solution, then the sugar crystals' growth will be affected.

If you don't have access to a stove, you can use a microwave instead. Combine the sugar and water in a microwave-safe glass and heat it for two minutes on high. Stir the sugar water and microwave for another 2 minutes. Stir the mixture a third time and the sugar should dissolve almost entirely into the water.

Examples of Hypotheses and Predictions

If I let a 70-pound dog and a 30-pound dog eat as much food as they want, then the 70-pound dog will eat more than the 30-pound dog. Does fertilizer make a plant grow bigger? Plants need many types of nutrients to grow.

What is the science behind rock candy? ›

A supersaturated solution is unstable—it contains more solute (in this case, sugar) than can stay in solution—so as the temperature decreases, the sugar comes out of the solution, forming crystals. The lower the temperature, the more molecules join the sugar crystals, and that is how rock candy is created.

Once a tiny crystal forms, it serves as a nucleation point. Other sugar molecules then glom on to it and make the crystal bigger. Seed crystals in the rock candy mix serve as this nucleation point, making the rock candy form faster.

Chemical Equation- The chemical equation for rock candy is C12H22O11(aq)--> C12H22O11(s). This is true because sucrose, table sugar, is an aqueous solution of sugar dissolving in water, and is formed into a solid of sugar molecules.

This type of simple mixture (sugar-water) is considered a hom*ogeneous solution by chemists and further termed aqueous, because the solvent is water. Rock candy is a type of sweet, formed by the crystallization (meaning to form crystals) of large sugar crystals coming out of solution.

You can start with a 1:2 water/sugar ratio, but we've had better luck just shy of a 1:3 water sugar ratio. So if you have 4 cups of water, you'll need between about 10 cups of sugar to make the perfect sugar syrup. Scroll to the bottom for some frequently asked questions for making rock candy.

A supersaturated solution is unstable—it contains more solute (in this case, sugar) than can stay in solution—so as the temperature decreases, the sugar comes out of the solution, forming crystals. The lower the temperature, the more molecules join the sugar crystals, and that is how rock candy is created.