[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. Guys, there is more for you to see. That box up at the top will transport
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