Happy Mother's Day! Candy Trivia

Happy Mother's Day!

In honor of the Kimkins moms (and moms everywhere), here's 2 candy secrets I'll bet you didn't know:

At Russel Stover Candies in Kansas City, MO, maraschino cherries are coated with a fondant mixture made of sugar, water and Convertit, an enzyme that makes sugar molecules break down. When the fondant hardens, the cherry is dipped in chocolate. But over the next 6-8 hours, the Convertiti makesthe sugar crystals disintegrate and become liquid again.

Mars makes more than 100,000,000,000 M&Ms every day, but no outsiders are allowed to watch the process. The rocess is similar to offset printing. Just imagine the individual M&Ms coming down in many lanes and running through the offset printing roll. Of course it's a very gentle imprint. The printing roll normally contains only Ms, but on certain holidays it is filled with bunnies, chicks and trees. The challenge is to print it at high speed, but to get 99% accuracy when no one is proofreading it.