Sunday Squee: Victorian Era Candy Creation

The Sunday Squee is about things that make me happy and excited. From books to movies to television shows to podcasts, I'll highlight less commonly known things as a way to share what I love. If you want to join in the Sunday Squee, please link back to me, magnifying both of our joy.

I ran across these via MetaFilter and quickly became entranced, both by the candies themselves and the aesthetic of creating them by hand. Lofty Pursuits is a geeky sweet shop in Florida which makes a wide variety of sweets using Victoria era mechanics and techniques - from hand pulling sugar to make it white, to using hand cranked machines to stamp out glorious drops of sugar. Above is a combination of the history of the fictional babelfish and the creation of sweet representations of that babelfish - along with info on the Vogon Poetry Contrast held in person and online. I love watching the sugar as it cools and becomes stange. Sugar is a Non-Newtonian Fluid, which means it has some of the properties of a solid even when it's liquid - much like glass, it oozes.

I love watching all the many ways in which the candy moves and can be manipulated in this video - and there's even artistry, like an eight pound candy cane or candy roses and into the history of humbug candies. I also ended up branching out into other candy related videos, a few of which I'll link below. It's wonderful to see people who love a thing and love to do a thing making that thing so skillfully - and it's wonderful to see how molten sugar can be made into so many amazing thing!