Cotton Candy Rules!

So, the Cotton Candy Machine I ordered finally arrived today. I got a sweet deal on the shipping because the guy on eBay I bought it from (New, Sealed in box with Lifetime Warranty, by the way) only charges $10 shipping for UPS Ground on machines, and will throw in free shipping for any flossugar you buy with a machine. So, I ordered (Angela paid for some of it) almost 17lbs of sugar in seven different flavours. I won’t have to buy more for ages. I don’t know how much it cost the guy to ship 25lbs from TN to AZ, but I’m glad I didn’t pay it.

Anyway, I was so glad to see that UPS had delivered the package even though I was in class tonight that I almost started dancing. I almost stopped and posted about how great UPS is for doing things like hiding my package out of sight and leaving me a note about where they put it, so I don’t have to wait until our schedules coincide to get my shipments, but I think that that sentence did that. I opened it up and read all the instructions and safety precautions and guidelines. (This is something I actually enjoy that seems to upset the people around me when they see me doing it. I don’t know why. I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the cotton candy right without guidance.) Then I fired it up, and per instructions, practiced with regular sugar (so as to spare my ‘expensive’ flavoured sugar), trying to figure out how to catch the flying, light-as-air, melts-in-your-mouth sugar on a paper tube. I got a little bit of the hang of it and started in on the Banana sugar right away. It didn’t seem to behave properly. In fact, it seemed to not create cotton candy at all. Was I doing something wrong? I let the machine spin down and tried again with a second batch of Banana. This time the machine started vibrating as a minute or two passed. I double-checked my instructions; putting too much sugar in can make it vibrate. I waited longer… now almost twice as long as I waited for the plain white sugar, and all of a sudden a double batch of cotton candy started pouring out onto my increasingly skillful paper tube, this time bright yellow.

I grabbed some of it and let it melt in my mouth as the machine was spinning up again. I had opened and put in a scoop of the Pink Vanilla (standard cotton candy flavour) to add to the outside of the Banana cone I had already started. This went on even better than before, and by the time I put on the third coat (Watermelon) I had something that looked almost like the huge spools of cotton candy you get at midways and carnivals. The instructions told me (and this is why I love instructions; they’re so often very, very correct and helpful) that it would take two or more scoops to make a full sized ‘cone’ of cotton candy. And it did, and it was delicious. And by the way, each scoop is less than an ounce, so I consumed something like … 35 calories.

Which is why I’m still hungry.

But, since I’m going straight to bed, I’m not going to eat. It’s usually not a good idea to eat within an hour or two of laying down to sleep. Doesn’t digest properly, can keep you awake or wake you in the middle of the night, or if you’re old and shrewd with money and the food is mustard or undercooked potato, it could even give you visions of the dead. (Which could then be exploited to make TV shows, right?) Anyway. Off to bed. I shall probably eat breakfast in the morning.