Your love for candles often makes you try different hacks that can make your candle burning more interesting, colorful, and fun. Right? What if one such idea triggers your mind one day of adding sprinkles to your candles? Well, before you give a concrete shape to your idea, find out first, “is it safe to put sprinkles in candles?”
After all candle burning involves fire and sprinkles don’t mix well with a flame. Yet, it’s not uncommon to see brilliant and colorful candles showing off their sprinkles. So what gives? Well, let’s take a deeper look at how it all works out. We’ll discuss if it’s viable to add sprinkles to candles or do we have better, safe, and more convenient alternatives.
All You Need To Know About Sprinkles In Candles And How They’re Made
Sprinkles! These sugary little colored bits add flavor, a pop of color, and a luxurious finish to desserts. Be it your ice creams, pastries, cakes, or donuts. The list is endless. Available in many flavors and colors, they impart a crispy texture to sweet treats.
Sprinkles make everything better. Even candles!
Wait, but how does this famous ingredient for desserts and sweet things work with a flame? To be clear, sprinkles are a great visual addition to candles. Functionally, they are a problem. If a sprinkle gets close to the flame, the heat will singe or burn it. This will cause smoke and an unpleasant smell.
That’s a big part of the reason that some care is necessary when adding sprinkles to candles. To get around this problem, candle makers try to keep sprinkles far away from the flame.
How Do Sprinkles Stay Away From The Flame?
As you can well imagine, the best place for sprinkles in this scenario is by fixing them on the outer edge of the candle. In the case of glass candles (candles in glass jars), this means fixing sprinkles to the glass.
It takes some ingenuity in making this work. And candle makers are quite the adaptive bunch! Here’s one method that works for adding sprinkles to candles while keeping them at a safe distance from the heat and flame.
The Basics Of Making A Candle With Sprinkles
A few simple home ingredients can make the basics for a sprinkled jar candle possible. While the nitty-gritty of candle making is beyond the scope of this article, we’ll go through a quick process for preparing a sprinkled jar.
For this process, you’ll need some corn syrup. About 2 oz should be enough, but it depends on the size of the jar. As for the jar, you can get a new one or upcycle the candle jar from one of your older candles.
Other necessary ingredients for the process are candle wax, sprinkles, and the wick. A paintbrush often comes in handy to manage the corn syrup, sprinkles, and even the wick.
- Apply corn syrup evenly on the walls and the base of the jar. You can use a paintbrush or just swirl some syrup in the jar to make a sticky coat for the walls.
- The surface should be sticky enough to hold the sprinkles.
- Fix the sprinkles on the walls and the base, but remember to keep room for the wick. You can use a paintbrush to make sure sprinkles get everywhere. You could even add some corn syrup on missed spots with the paintbrush.
- Insert the wick and fix it to the sticky base of the jar.
- Melt soy or paraffin wax and pour the melted wax into the jar.
- Let the wax cool down overnight and your sprinkled candle is ready to use.
Is Adding Sprinkles To Candles Safe And Fun?
Well when you decide to burn a candle with sprinkles, you may encounter a few annoying issues. See no matter if you paste the sprinkles on the walls and base of the jar with caution, it never works 100 percent.
Sprinkles can detach from the jar and eventually find their way to the burning wick. As they come close to the flame, the sprinkles will burn to release smoke and an unpleasant smell. Burnt sprinkles residue can stick to the wick and destroy it.
Burnt sprinkles lead to the deposition of soot on the wick, jar, and the surroundings. It may fall in the wax pool. This can potentially render a candle useless. Burnt sprinkles can alter the scent of your candle. Besides, burnt sugar from the sprinkles leaves a stench that disturbs the ambiance of the room.
More often than not, we are willing to take that risk. After all, scented candles with sprinkles are positively mesmerizing.
If only there was a better way to have sprinkles in our candles.
Wax Sprinkles For Candles: A Great Alternative To Edible Sprinkles
Wax sprinkles for candles have an edge over conventional sprinkles. There’s no need to worry about the smoke, soot, damage to the wick, or the bad smell of burnt sprinkles.
Scented wax sprinkles work fabulously with candles. They add to the looks and functionality. They don’t need to stay away from the wick, so they allow a more creative appearance to the candles.
The only downside to wax sprinkles is that they’re more expensive than conventional sprinkles. However, it’s not a big problem and is unlikely to greatly affect the cost of the candle.
Sprinkled Candles are available in both versions, those with conventional sprinkles, and those with wax sprinkles. Take a closer look at the ingredients and choose what works best for you.
Can You Put Candy In Candles?
Candies? Now that we’ve got sprinkles covered, let’s take a closer look at another favorite treat and its use in candles.
Unlike sprinkles, candies aren’t tiny. So things can get more challenging and you have to wonder can you put candy in candles? And really, would it be a good choice to do so?
Like sprinkles, you can add candies to candles. It won’t be a delicious treat for the taste buds, but it is a delight for the eyes. Using whole candies isn’t the best idea, so it’s better to break them into bits and use them as sprinkles.
The point to note down here is that candies are higher in sugar content and sugar is flammable. This makes candies more troublesome should they approach the wick or flame.
So is there no way out to enjoy your candy candles? Or, do you relinquish it and leave it for your sweet cravings?
The answer is simple, use wax candies! Wax candies offer the same functional advantages over candies as wax sprinkles over conventional sprinkles. You can manipulate wax candies to look almost like regular candies. Except, they’ll be made of wax and indelible.
If you’re buying a candle with candies, those which offer wax candies are superior options. If you know how to work with wax, making wax candies is simple. You could even use silicone candy molds to give them the desired shape.
Candy canes or gingerbread men in the candles can be pretty awesome for the season, right?
Do Sprinkles Go Bad? Do They Have A Expiry Date?
When we discussed the ingredients of sprinkles, its best before date too needs attention. We all know anything expired loses its potency to deliver desired results and sometimes may result in an unpleasant experience.
So do sprinkles go bad? Generally, sprinkles retain their flavor and texture for 18 months from the date of manufacture. But you can still go on using them after their expiry date for a few more months until you see signs of discoloration, loss of flavor, smell, and a dry texture. It all boils down to storing them correctly.
And, if you are inquisitive to know, do candy sprinkles go bad? Then yes they do expire but not literally. They too show signs of expiration like the sprinkles. Usually, their freshness remains locked from 6 months to a year from the date of manufacturing.
Although since we’re more concerned about the use of sprinkles in candles, the expiry date isn’t all that important. Sprinkles for use in candles aren’t meant for consumption, so it doesn’t matter if they’re way past their expiry date. In this case, the only thing that matters is that the sprinkles maintain their brilliant colors and shape.
Now, what about wax sprinkles and wax candies? Wax does expire but unlike the edible sprinkles and candies, they degrade over time and show few signs of expiry. If you use organic wax blocks like soy wax, then use the sprinkles and candies made from them within a year as they degrade early. It is advisable to burn candles within 18 months of manufacturing.
Recommendations For Candles With Sprinkles And Sprinkles For Candle-Making
Celebration Jumbo Cupcake Candles – Top Recommended
The prefix “celebration” says it all that makes them ideal to burn on festive occasions. These handmade candles have a wonderful scent and appearance. The cupcake is designed with a muffin top, filled with colorful wax sprinkles.
This candle is a wax mix of soy and beeswax. The sprinkles are beautifully crafted from soy wax, so you can burn the candle without a worry. The candles are 100% organic and burn clean.
Celebration Jumbo Cupcake Candle measures 4x3x3 inches and weighs 9.5 ounces.
While it has a lot of qualities, the most important characteristic of this candle is that it looks and smells awesome!
Happy Birthday Candle- Pink Magenta jar, Sprinkles, Birthday Cake Scented Candle
This sprinkled and scented candle from Cedar Crate Market is made from soy wax and infused with the scent of “buttercream vanilla cake”. The brand claims the candle is 100% soy wax and free from paraffin, parabens, and artificial colors. The candle has a burn time of 50 to 60 hours.
The look of the candle is quite fascinating. It comes in a pink colored jar with a wooden lid. The specifications include its dimensions: 3.25×3.25×4 inches. It weighs 9 ounces.
What is most impressive about this candle is its overall look. It’s just what one can think of as an excellent birthday gift for your friends or family. It comes packed in a gift box. The smell is quite strong but just like the buttercream vanilla cake. The sprinkles give it a festive and fun look.
Kate Bissetts Unicorn Farts Candle With Crystal Shart Sprinkles
The first thing that grabs our attention when we see this candle is the labeling. The word “fart” seems to be quite playful but then they threw in the part about shart too! The candle is a blend of soy and coconut wax with a flat braided cotton wick. The technical aspects include the weight of 10 ounces and dimensions of 5x4x4 inches.
Kate Bissetts Unicorn Farts Candle has a lovely cotton candy scent, with a good cold throw and fairly strong hot throw for the scent.
I didn’t find the candle to be smoke-free, but I did find the scent and the overall appearance to be quite worth the effort.
Hoosier Hill Farm Rainbow Decorating Sprinkles
Hoosier Hill Farm Rainbow Decorating Sprinkles are excellent for your dessert. These are conventional sprinkles, but you can use them with your candles too. If you’re taking the DIY route for putting sprinkles in candles, these can be a decent choice.
Wax Sprinkles For Candles
If you’re going to use sprinkles for candles, wax sprinkles are always the superior choice. These wax sprinkles come in rainbow or confetti colors and add delight to your candles. These are handmade and you can put them in the jar without worrying about the wick or the stench. It’s just the wax!
Just to be clear, these are not edible. Let them stay in your jar candles.
Sprinkles Or Wax Sprinkles: The Better Choice For Candles
If we stick to our original premise of is it safe to put sprinkles in candles, the answer is yes, but with caveats. Sprinkles do give a makeover to candles, but conventional sprinkles are best suited for dessert, not candles. There is always a risk of conventional sprinkles burning and letting off a foul smell.
Let’s put it straight. Why disrupt your beautiful sprinkled candle-burning moments when you have wax-scented sprinkles? They are quite equivalent to your favorite sprinkles.
Wax sprinkles are a superior option for burning candles, but conventional sprinkles do have their uses too. Whatever you choose for your candles of these two, keep the safety points in mind while burning a candle.