To the eye, they appear as substantial as a stuffed toy rescued from an arcade claw machine: Minions, unicorns, Cookie Monsters, Hello Kitty. These are the typical subjects of candyfloss art – characters constructed from nothing but spun sugar.
There are a number of reasons why you can’t try this at home. The first is the equipment. This is no ordinary candyfloss machine, but an expensive bit of kit that drives the liquid sugar through tiny, laser-cut holes, producing a fine cloud of sucrose, like cobwebbing.
The second is the skill. It’s not easy to make a unicorn out of cotton candy. You can watch people do it on YouTube all day without having a clue how to proceed; it doesn’t look as if it should work.
John McGlone, who runs a couple of dessert shops in Greater Glasgow called Ice Lab, came across the idea a few years ago. His daughter Sophie showed him a YouTube clip of a vendor in China creating an intricate candyfloss flower.
“As soon as I see it, I’m saying: we need to learn how to do that,” he says. “Either bring the person over here to work, or learn how to do it.”
Covid restrictions got in the way for a time, but eventually McGlone and his daughter spent a week in China training with a candyfloss artist, using only Google Translate to communicate, before returning home to introduce the technique to the UK, where they would become candyfloss pioneers.
But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. They went through six machines before they found one capable of producing candyfloss of the correct consistency. Even the sugar in the UK proved to be different. “It took us a long while to get to where we’re at,” says McGlone.
Sonya Song and her husband, Shu Zhang, opened Muah, their store in Chicago, in July. Before they did so, they spent eight months in their kitchen with a candyfloss machine, teaching themselves the finer points of the discipline (and repeatedly setting off their smoke alarm). For a while, they stopped inviting friends over because of the mess. “Sugar everywhere,” says Zhang. “Really sticky. After we moved the machine out, we spent two months cleaning up all the sugar; it was on the ceiling and everywhere.”
Eventually, however, they got the hang of candyfloss rabbits, pandas and Pikachus, or at least Song did. “It’s all my wife,” Zhang says. “I gave up very early.”
Song says: “We have different talents. I can create characters and work in front of people under pressure.” Making candyfloss art is as much performance as retail: customers are reliably entranced by the process.
New characters require a period of development, Song says: “It’s a long process to turn the cotton candy into edible art. When I close my eyes, I think about how to make it cuter, how to do the eyes.” In China, she says, candyfloss vendors often resort to stickers to complete a character’s look. “I want to make everything cute and edible,” she says.
McGlone shares this high standard. “Everything you see is edible,” he says. “Bar the stick.” The Ice Lab outlets introduced a number of options for Christmas, including an impressive Grinch.
Song and Zhang’s newest – and already most popular – character is Baby Frosty, a juvenile snowman with a red hat. “We constantly update our menu to try to bring more surprise for our customers,” she says.
Any expansion is dependent on being able to train others in the art – but, with practice and experience, their confidence is increasing. “Now, we can make anything in a cute shape,” says Zhang.
