Tuesday 13 September 2011

Candy Floss!

Some little girls want to be ballet dancers or princesses, or even something actually possible (!) when they grow up. But I think I always knew my vocation in life, sugar addict that I am, was to be a candy floss seller (though why I had to wait until I got to Tokyo to actually do something about it, history doesn't relate).


That knowledge was put to the test, and proved, in the weekend, when I finally got to operate a candy floss machine at the Kamiochiai Jidookan Muramatsuri. It's called 'watagashi' (literally 'cotton sweetie') in Japanese, but apart from the label on the safety guard  - わた it's the exact same thing. Here's me making a slightly hesitant start


And then really getting into it


 I had to let others have a go after a while, even though I didn't want to, really


It didn't take me long to start creating some pretty wonderful mixtures of colours and swirled patterns and perfect shapes - I am clearly an extremely talented artisan, at least one person said so! Well

I hadn't realised that the stuff was so easy to make - all you do is pour a little bit of coloured sugar into the hole in the machine, wait until it heats up, and the centrifugal force of the spinning spits out all of this wool-like stuff ready for you to roll it onto a stick (a chopstick in my case) and hey presto! Most videos of the process make it look a bit boring although when I found this one, I did wonder whether these arty people thought the sugar storm was quite as interesting when they had to clean the room afterwards


Candy floss. Food for the gods. And the artists. And the laura's, of this world.

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