Puffed Up Productions

Don't burn your fingers in the painted orange flame. S’mores once required a conflagration of some sort, either in a fireplace or out-of-doors. Here’s how a child’s introduction to the making of this sweet treat might have gone in the old days: A demolitions expert, who works for the Army Corps of Engineers and plays with dynamite for a living, leads a jeep brigade to the gravel bar of a remote Ozark stream one moonlit night, with the promise that "Kids, you're about to learn the single most effective way to make a campfire." The adults have crammed into the front of the rusty open vehicles, while the children ride in the back, the lucky ones standing up and holding onto roll bars, the unluckier clutching the bouncing sides as their shins get banged by heavy metal beer coolers and lawn chairs. Mist rises through the bottomland fields, white and weed-scented, while the whippoorwills quit their whipping, disquieted by the passing roar. At water's edge, yo...

Wheels not meant to rotate! Cotton candy is the intangible fusion of sweetness and light, transubstantiated into sugar and air by the calliope pipings of merry-go-rounds, three-ring circuses, and Ferris wheels. The preferred diet of radiant beings like Tinker Bell and My Little Pony, it is formed in the magic circle of centrifugal force. The mechanics of cotton candy making are always the same: Heat up some sugar and spin it. But untangling the history of the machinery involved is as sticky as eating the substance under discussion. Wharton and Morrison, a pair of candy-makers from Nashville, patented their "fairy floss" maker in 1897 and peddled the resultant sensation at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Patton sold his patented device to the Ringling Brothers circus in 1900, where the insubstantial filaments it blew forth became an instant crowd-pleaser. Lascaux, a dentist in New Orleans, came up with the actual name “Cotton Candy” in 1921 when devising a gizmo t...