The algorithm is showing me candy-making videos, and I have no idea why, but this is not a complaint. They are exceedingly cool. Each one starts with a full frontal shot of a hip northern European guy dispensing a giant cauldron of hot sugar syrup onto a table and announcing the candy of the day. Syrup gushes lavalike across the table, filling a flat rectangular frame, while the candy maker upends the cauldron and lets gravity work the last sticky strands loose. Once the syrup lies out on the table like a sweet, becalmed, half-inch-deep ocean, already crystallizing like ice-nine, the candy maker adds his flavors and colors. Red blue green yellow, they come in long-necked, alchemical-looking beakers, and when he pours then into the syrup they boil and bubble up, a witches’ brew. He stirs them in and smoothes them out with a small wooden spatula, each color in its own square. The ocean now resembles a painting by Mark Rothko. Then he takes his long, sharp, blue-handled shears and snap snap cuts up the painting and suddenly we are doing ceramics, pushing and smooshing, pulling and turning the rapidly cooling melt, hand molding the sugar clay into logs and rolls and slabs that get assembled in such an order to produce upon stretching into thin, stripey snakes whatever candy cross-sections the customer ordered up: ducks, suns, hearts, lemons, baby names, wedding welcomes. The finished candies are struck one by one off the ends of long, solidified bars with a tool you could use to spackle sheetrock. They pile up at the end of the production line like gemstones. The confectionary term is hard crack. I want one.

How to make sun candy, Rocks & Rolls Candy, Kapellestraat 21, 4524 CW Sluis, Netherlands.