The TikTok 'Magic Candy' Tastes Like Honeycomb And Only Requires 2 Ingredients

Sugar not only sweetens desserts and is crucial in baking, but its crystalline structure morphs into numerous forms with the help of heat and patience. After all, most hard candy has a foundation of boiled water and sugar. The famous homemade honeycomb toffee adds baking soda to sugar to create a light and airy sugar candy with a bubbly crunch. While honeycomb is already a simple recipe, TikTok influencers have revealed an even simpler way to make sugar candy at home. A recipe TikTokers call "magic candy" uses only brown sugar and baking soda to create blobs of candy with a caramelized flavor and a delightful crispy and chewy textural contrast. 

The recipe entails slowly heating a half-cup of brown sugar in a nonstick skillet for 10-12 minutes, stirring constantly with a rubber spatula. The brown sugar will melt into a deep brown liquid, at which point you'll remove the skillet from the heat and add a teaspoon of baking soda. As you stir in the baking soda, it will react with the sugar and begin to foam. Once the baking soda has completely dissolved into the foaming brown sugar, quickly spoon the foam into blobs over a greased baking pan and let cool. The result is a shatteringly crunchy caramelized sugar exterior that cedes to a chewy, nougat-like, crackly interior. You can customize these candies by dipping them into melted chocolate or adorning them with sprinkles or sesame seeds while they cool. 

In her quick and informative TikTok video, foodie influencer @aroseslimes reveals the magic transformation brown sugar undergoes when it reacts with baking soda. This viral hack for magic candy is all over the social media platform, with many comments likening it to honeycomb, another bubbly sugar candy made with the help of baking soda. There are many key differences, however, including ingredients and cooking methods.

Magic candy is a two-ingredient recipe, whereas honeycomb recipes tend to use both sugar and corn syrup or honey, water, baking soda, and often vanilla. Additionally, honeycomb is made by boiling its ingredients in a saucepan over the stove. This is a process that requires the use of a thermometer and precision to ensure that the sugar and water mixture doesn't burn. Magic candy, on the other hand, has no liquid ingredients, relying instead on a slower yet simpler process of melting the sugar. Furthermore, since honeycomb has a greater liquid volume, it's poured into a baking pan or sheet to be broken apart like bark once cooled. While baking soda reacts with a thin sheen of melted brown sugar to almost double its volume, there's still a much smaller portion of candy you can easily extract and arrange on a baking sheet with the same spatula used to mix it. Both candy recipes demand quick action for the final stage of setting, as sugar hardens and sticks to either the saucepan or the skillet in an instant.