Monthly Archives: July 2010

One of the most frequent questions I get is, “What program do I use to make all of my pictures?”  I thought I’d devote a little time to share this information with all of you.

After using many photo editing software programs over the years, I stumbled upon a relatively unknown software (at the time) that gave me all of the “extras” I needed:

Comic Life

Plasq’s Comic Life program (for both Mac and Windows at www.plasq.com) helps families have a little fun with their photographs.  Importing photos into the program is a simple drag-and-drop procedure.  Once your photos are uploaded, it is easy to create professional-level comics complete with thought bubbles and 3D titles with the existing fonts on your computer.

If you have seen any of my work within the Classic Science Textbooks, you have noticed individual “cartoon-style pictures” that I created.  What you have not seen is an extended property of Comic Life which can create entire pages of cartoon templates automatically!

I have to be honest with you… this software comes with a price ($25 for the Standard edition/$30 for Deluxe.)  Now before you open your wallets, there is a 30-day free trial which I highly recommend!

You will also find a ton of information on the internet concerning Comic Life and how it can be used both for fun and educational purposes.  You can check out one of these resources at http://www.macinstruct.com/node/69

The ease of this program to create comics of this quality satisfied my “inner comic book geek” quickly (I always wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up.)

I’m certain your family will find new joys in approaching your photo albums with this software!

You’ve learned how important crystals are to the creation of hard candies like butterscotch and peanut brittle and soft candies like fudge, but are there any times when you would want a candy without ANY crystals at all?

Well, the candies I just mentioned all have one specific property about them (and it’s not their simple ingredients of sugar and water.)

Can you guess what it is?

If you said that you can’t see through them (which is what scientists call opaque “oh-pay-kuh”) you are correct!  The opposite of being opaque is to be transparent.  Objects that are transparent, like windows, allow light to travel through them very easily.  And since I’m throwing around some scientific terms, let’s review some basic concepts about science that may come in handy this week:

Light cannot easily pass through most candies that are formed from crystals.  The crystals tend to get in the way of the light passing through the candy and block it from traveling through.  This makes an object opaque.

MAKING EDIBLE GLASS

The texture of transparent candy is much different than the other hard and soft candies we have explored so far.  The trick to make this type of candy is to first boil off most of the water within your sugar syrup.  Yep!  You want all of those ATOMS inside water to absorb as much heat energy as you can so that they will evaporate into the atmosphere!

By removing so much water from the syrup, you have increased the DENSITY of sugar molecules within the solution.

THIS IS GOOD!  REMEMBER – THE MORE WATER A SYRUP CONTAINS, THE SOFTER THE CANDY WILL BE

You’ve never seen a SOFT glass before right?  No way!  This type of candy is going to look AND feel like glass! So you need as much water out of that solution as possible.

After making your sugar solution incredibly hot,  the next step is to keep the sugar molecules from sticking together and forming crystals.

You may believe that the formation of crystals means that something new is being created within the solution.  However, if you have been following this blog for any period of time you would know that this does not happen!  ATOMS cannot be created (or destroyed) during the formation of crystals.  The LAW OF CONSERVATION supports this beautifully!  All that is happening is the rearranging of ATOMS within the solution into a crystal structure!  Okay, back to the candy…

Any crystals at all will cause this molten mass of sugar to turn into an opaque mess very quickly!

In order to keep these sugar molecules from binding together you have to DIFFUSE their energy away as quickly as you can!

This means you have to lower its temperature very very quickly.  If you don’t lower the temperature fast, the molecules will slow down and move into each other.  This is bad!  As they slow down, they start to stick to each other, and this is how crystals are formed.

Since crystals are made up of several sugar molecules bound together, they are large enough to block light as it passes through the candy.  This causes the candy to be opaque.  (I know I already said that once in this post, but it is very important to the next few lines…)

However, when you cool a sugar solution really fast, the sugar molecules get “stuck” in the cooling fluid and do not have the energy to move around and bind to each other.  And, since sugar molecules are so tiny, light does not bounce off of them.  This makes the candy transparent.

By the way – this is almost exactly how people make sheets of glass!  Naturally, the windows on your home are not made of sugar molecules (please don’t go around the house licking your windows.) Instead, a molecule called silicon dioxide is melted, poured, and its temperature lowered to create most of the glass that we typically find in our homes!

Movie makers have known about this property for YEARS!  In fact, it is a pretty good guess that the majority of bottles and windows that are broken over actors within the movies are made from this rapidly cooled syrup!

By the way, I’m still waiting to see the outtakes at the end of a movie where an actor starts sucking on a broken piece of “candy glass.”  I know it will happen someday…

Learn more about chemistry concepts (and many more) in the Classic Science: Series for the Family and be certain to come back every Thursday or subscribe to The Blog of Mr.Q to learn more about how to teach science during breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

Let’s review a couple of things before we dive into another way to change the texture of candy.  First of all, you learned the following rule in Part I of How To Teach Science With Candy:

THE MORE WATER A SYRUP CONTAINS, THE SOFTER THE CANDY WILL BE

This rule has to do with the TEMPERATURE  of the heated sugar water solution.  The higher the temperature of syrup, the less water it will have as it boils off and DIFFUSES into the atmosphere.

In Part II of How To Teach Science With Candy, you learned about another rule in candy making:

HOT SYRUPS FORM ROUGH, JAGGED CRYSTALS AND COOLER SYRUPS FORM SMOOTH, SMALLER CRYSTALS

This means that hot syrups contain many ATOMS that have absorbed a lot of energy and are bouncing around inside the solution.  All of this bouncing keeps sugar molecules from binding together very easily into crystals.  (How easy would it be for you to hold on to someone if an army of people kept slamming into you?) However, the few crystals that DO happen to form grow very quickly as ATOMS continue to bind to their surface.

So the big question is – How do we make smooth textured candies?

Before we tackle that question, let’s review the four main concepts of science:

IT’S TIME TO STIR THINGS UP!

You just read that “cooler syrups form smooth, smaller crystals.”  Therefore, all you need to do is make certain that the syrup you have cooked is cooled down considerably before you start…

STIRRING!

As a syrup solution cools, its ATOMS are DIFFUSING their energy into the bowl and the environment in the form of heat.  As this energy leaves the ATOMS, they slow down to the point where they are not bouncing into each other anymore.  When this happens they cannot bind to the crystals that exist within the syrup.  However, you can force sugar molecules together by STIRRING the solution!

In fact, you create a massive amount of sugar crystals as you stir the cooled syrup.  This means the DENSITY of sugar crystals increases as long as you keep stirring the solution!  This is very good if you want a smooth candy with lots of tiny crystals!

Remember… larger crystals are formed in hot syrups as many of the newly created tiny crystals are broken apart by fast moving sugar molecules.

Not only are there slower moving sugar molecules in a cool syrup, there is another cool trick to making smooth candies with lots of tiny crystals:

As more and more sugar crystals are formed within the cool syrup, there are fewer sugar molecules floating around in the syrup.  With fewer free sugar molecules moving around, the existing crystals will be unable to grow very large!

This is the secret to having bulging arm muscles when making fudge.  In order to get the smooth texture of this delicious dessert, you need to mix the cooled syrup very hard for a very long time!  Because if you stop stirring, you stop making smaller crystals!  This means the existing crystals in the syrup immediately begin to grow very large!  This will make the texture of your fudge gritty and coarse.

It may SOUND like it’s no big deal, but you’ll be sweating before you’re done!  It take a lot of stirring to make fudge!

Okay… quick review:

Hot syrup = fewer, large crystals

Cool syrup = more, smaller crystals

Making crystals = no destruction or creation of any atoms (Don’t’ forget the LAW OF CONSERVATION!)

Learn more about chemistry concepts (and many more) in the Classic Science: Series for the Family and be certain to come back every Thursday or subscribe to The Blog of Mr.Q to learn more about how to teach science during breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

Last week you learned that nearly all of the candy we know and love comes from a heated solution of sugar and water.  But even with these few ingredients, cooks have learned how to manipulate several of the variables in the cooking of this solution.

However, the temperature of the syrup not only affects the TYPE of candy you can create –

It affects the TEXTURE of the candy too!

The way in which cooks can alter the texture of candy has EVERYTHING to do with the four basic concepts of science:

These four concepts are very important as your candy cools and forms its own unique texture.  These concepts play a big role in the creation of your candy, especially if you want the smooth texture of fudge or the rough and jagged texture of rock candy.

GAZE INTO THE CRYSTAL BALL…

Fudge and rock candy have COMPLETELY different textures!  The reason for this change has to do with the number and size of the crystals in the syrup.  If you recall from our discussion on ice cream, a crystal is a mass of ATOMS or molecules bonded together in an orderly fashion, like soldiers in formation.  The cool thing about crystals in your syrup is that they will continue to bind with other similar ATOMS or molecules that are moving around in the fluid.

Think of a line of children, all holding hands, running around a playground.  The two children at the ends of the line can grab other children as they move around the playground and increase their size.  This is how a crystal grows as well!

And there is one simple rule to follow about crystals whenever you are making candy:

HOT SYRUPS FORM ROUGH, JAGGED CRYSTALS AND COOLER SYRUPS FORM SMOOTH, SMALLER CRYSTALS

But how does this work?  It’s simple…

As you probably have guessed, the ATOMS within your heated solution of sugar water absorb energy from you stove as its temperature increases.  This energy DIFFUSES into each of the ATOMS, causing them to bounce around and into each other quite a lot.

Because of all this bouncing going on, it is harder for molecules to line up, bond with each other in an orderly fashion, and form a crystal.  So, hot syrups do not make many crystals because of all the energized ATOMS bouncing into each other!

To go back to our previous story… it would be very difficult (not impossible) for a line of children to form on the playground if they were running around as fast as they could.  Think about it… as a line of kids would form, they could easily get broken apart by individual children slamming into them!  The few lines that would form could get VERY large as they have so many extra children to grab onto.  This is the same with crystals in a hot sugar solution.

Once crystals can form inside a hot sugar solution, other sugar molecules will tend to bounce into this crystal and bind with it – making a larger crystal!   Therefore hot syrup will have a lower DENSITY of sugar crystals but each crystal will be MUCH larger than crystals in cooler syrup.

THESE LARGER CRYSTALS GIVE HOT SYRUP A VERY ROUGH AND JAGGED TEXTURE WHEN IT COOLS

Okay.  Are any ATOMS created or destroyed during the formation of crystals?  Nope! It may seem like something strange is going on when you witness the growth of a crystal, but you know for certain that all of this movement follows the LAW OF CONSERVATION! There’s no way any ATOMS are being created during crystal formation, only rearranged into new (and sometimes tasty) forms.

Learn more about chemistry concepts (and many more) in the Classic Science: Series for the Family and be certain to come back every Thursday or subscribe to The Blog of Mr.Q to learn more about how to teach science during breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

Whether you prefer lollipops or peppermints, cotton candy or caramels,  they all share the most simplistic list of ingredients – sugar and water. Scientists (aka – “cooks”) have spent lifetimes learning how to melt, stir, heat, and cool down this syrupy solution to produce all of the candies we know and love today.

Think about it!  A simple mixture of sugar and water, with the proper handling, can end up as a thick syrup, a glass-like ball, a stretchy blob. a semi-solid mass….  I could go on and on!

So how can two simple ingredients be converted into such a HUGE variety of candies?

We have learned how to handle this simple solution by controlling the amount of sugar and water, how hot the solution gets, how much it is stirred, and how quickly it cools.

The true art of knowing how all of these factors can be changed to provide the type of candy we want is the topic of these next few posts.  But first, let’s look at the four main concepts of science to prepare for today’s discussion:

This week, we are going to look at the basic formation of crystals within the cooking of sugar and water.  You should be familiar with how crystals are formed when we looked at the Science of Ice Cream.

Let’s get started…

CONCENTRATE ON THE SUGAR

Since we are only looking at two basic ingredients this week, let’s play around with how much of each we can mix together AND what that does to the creation of our candy.

Below is a simple rule to follow when making candy:

The more water a syrup contains, the softer the candy will be.

First of all, water itself boils at 100 degrees Celsius.  However, when you add sugar into the water, the temperature at which water boils INCREASES a little bit.  Why?

To put it simply… the sugar gets in the way!  The ATOMS within sugar molecules compete with the water molecules as they absorb heat energy from the stove.  This means that the water molecules cannot boil as fast because some of the heat energy is DIFFUSING into the sugar molecules.  Because of this, you have to add MORE energy into the solution of water and sugar (which raises the temperature) in order for the water molecules to absorb enough energy to break away from each other and escape as a gas.

So what does this have to do with making soft candy?

As you heat up a syrup, it’s temperature will continue to rise because its ATOMS are vibrating around in the container quite a lot.  As more water molecules DIFFUSE into the air as water vapor the DENSITY of the sugar molecules remaining in the syrup will increase.  Therefore, the remaining syrup becomes more concentrated with sugar.

Another way to say this is…

As the temperature of the syrup increases, its sugar DENSITY increases as well.  This causes the candy to become more and more firm as you continue cooking it!

KEEP AN EYE ON THE TEMPERATURE

Cooks can easily prepare a huge variety of candies by simply watching the temperature of the syrup!  For example:

• The spreadable, fruity preserves we place on our toast is the result of the syrup reaching a temperature of 102-113 degrees Celsius.
• Fudge needs a temperature between 113-116 degrees.
• Caramels begin to form around 118-121 degrees.
• Marshmallows appear around 121-130 degrees.
• Taffy forms between 132-143 degrees.
• Butterscotch candies and other brittles (think Peanut Brittle) appear around 149-154 degrees.
• And so on…

Do you see a pattern with these candies as the temperature increases?

As the temperature increases, more water evaporates out of the candy and it becomes more firm.  Therefore…

The more water a syrup contains, the softer the candy will be!

Naturally, all of this movement of ATOMS follows the LAW OF CONSERVATION beautifully because no ATOMS are being created or destroyed, merely rearranged throughout the environment!

Okay… the firmness of a candy can be easily changed by altering the temperature of the syrup.  But how do you change its texture? Stay tuned to next week where you will learn another cool trick that candy makers have learned over the years.

Learn more about chemistry concepts (and many more) in the Classic Science: Series for the Family and be certain to come back every Thursday or subscribe to The Blog of Mr.Q to learn more about how to teach science during breakfast, lunch, and dinner!