Harry Potter Rock Candy Wands

Although it technically isn’t a type of candy featured in the the Harry Potter books, Ladybug was pretty impressed by the rock candy or sweet crystal sticks in Honeydukes at Universal Studios.  These were actually not badly priced, but I thought they would be more fun to make at home. So we decided to add them to our list of homemade Harry Potter projects. Plus, I wanted to make them more “Harry Pottery.” So instead of using a stick, we used a wand! And I couldn’t have been happier with how these Harry Potter Rock Candy Wands turned out. I love how it looks like the glowing tips of the wands you see in the Harry Potter movies.

Sucking on your wand sounds like something that Ron Weasley would do, but you can’t blame her when it is covered in candy! Notice how her hair isn’t even brushed for this photo? There is no time for staging when you are having fun! Science before beauty!

Harry Potter Rock Candy Wands Tutorial

The first thing you are going to need are food grade wands. I used these nifty, twisty chopsticks I found on Amazon. I had used them a few years ago for a Harry Potter Party and they were perfect.

My kids love crystals and this turned into a really fun STEM activity. I would recommend experimenting with rock candy a few times if you are going to make these as party favors because we discovered that the rock candy can be a little temperamental. But as a science experiment, it was fun to see what worked and what didn’t, then try to figure out why.

The first thing you will need to do is add one cup of water to a pot and bring it to a boil. Then one cup at a time, add 3-4 cups of sugar. Make sure you stir it a lot and that it all dissolves so that the solution is clear. We found that we got better crystals the more sugar we added. So keep stirring and see how much you can dissolve in there. To fill five glasses, we had to triple the recipe. You will also want to add some flavoring because plain rock candy isn’t very exciting. We added peppermint.

You will now want to let your sugar solution cool for about 30 minutes. While you wait, you can dip the tip of your wands in the sugar solution and then roll it in sugar. Let it dry so that the sugar stays on. This helps give the sugar crystals something to grow off of. But be careful that none of the sugar lands at the bottom of the cup or you will get a lot growing off the bottom as well, which can make it a pain to get out of the glass.

We balanced the wands in the glasses by using two clothespins. Next time I think I will use plastic cups. I had to soak these glasses forever to get the crystals off the sides.

Ladybug then added the food coloring to the glasses. We decided to go with Hogwarts colors of course!

We then poured the sugar solution into the glasses, stirred it around with the food coloring and reinserted the wands. We learned the hard way that you want to give enough room between the bottom of the wand and the bottom of the glass for the crystals to grow. One of the yellow ones got stuck and I accidentally broke the tip off trying to get it out.

Now it is time to wait. We ended up waiting for seven days because we wanted to see how big the crystals would get. One of our biggest problems was with crystals growing on the top, bottom, and the sides. I would recommend switching the wand to a new glass after a few days and pouring the mixture into the new glass while straining out the crystals.

We couldn’t help but wonder if the food coloring had something to do with how the crystals grew. Or maybe it is because my kids kept sneaking in to mess with them. The blue one gave us crazy crystals and wasn’t very uniform. But it looked really cool. This photo doesn’t do it justice. This was one of the kids’ favorite wands.

The green one gave us very few crystals even though the wand was in the mixture for the same amount of time.

And the red and the yellow gave us the best crystals! See what I mean though, it would pay to experiment a few times if you are going to make them for a party. And you might want to hide them behind locked doors if you have little ones, or even big ones with insatiable curiosity.

After the kids were done eating their wands, we found that the wand was still in perfect condition. I ran it through the dishwasher and it was ready for role-playing. Both my kids agreed that our Harry Potter Rock Candy Wands were way better than the ones at Honeydukes.