The Candle Maker

I am so excited to have discovered The Candle Maker. It is a new product being stocked at Candle Creations (and other places I’m sure) that is described as:

“The Candle Maker by Chandler & Me is a ‘world first’ product designed right here in New Zealand. This innovative new appliance allows you to easily make a candle in 20 minutes with less mess and no fuss; there’s no need to muck around with double boilers, thermometers or any of the other gear you usually use! The Candle Maker is programmed to heat and stir your soy candle ingredients to the perfect temperatures, ready to pour to your candle jar.”

The Candle Maker really is super easy to use and is perfect for making candles at home. It is quite small so you can only make a few candles at a time – 250g of wax is about the maximum you can put in at a time but I managed to get it up to 284g successfully. I tried using it for making a 600ml candle and had to make it in 2 stages but this is fine because the first lot of wax hadn’t even started to harden when I put the second lot in the container. I also tried topping up some other candles that had already set and that seemed to work fine as well.

It is so easy. You plug the machine in and when you sit the jug on top it activates and the lights come on. There are 3 main symbols that light up as well as a series of dots to show you how it is progressing.

• The first symbol flashes and beeps and tells you to add the wax. Then you push that symbol and it starts to slowly melt the wax, and it automatically stirs as well until the wax is all melted and reaches the desired 80-85C temperature.
• Then it goes to the next symbol and beeps for you to add the fragrance oil. It won’t move to the next stage until you push the symbol to let it know you have done as it asks. It stirs the fragrance in well and keeps stirring as the wax is allowed to cool to 60-65C.
• After the final symbol and beep it is ready for you to pour the wax into your candle containers. The whole cycle takes 20 minutes.

After jumping straight to making a large scented candle on my first attempt with a starter kit, this time I thought I’d better follow the instructions and make the plain unscented tea light candles. The instructions say to melt approx 180g of wax flakes for the 6 tea light candles. This was much more than enough for the small tea light candles so I wasn’t sure if they had meant to use the larger containers. It doesn’t ever matter if you melt too much wax as you can use it to top up other candles or just let it set and re-melt it next time.

I spent an afternoon making lots of different candles of all shapes and sizes, each with different fragrances, sometimes needing 2 batches to fill a container. Even though 20 minutes seems like a long cycle time, you end up using that time easily sorting out your containers and wicks, as well as planning, weighing and measuring for the next candle so I never felt like I was waiting around for too long. Unless I was wanting to make a large batch of candles all at once, I won’t be going back to using a Pyrex jug in a saucepan with a thermometer. This has totally simplified making soy candles and I’m hooked. Clean up is ultra simple too: just wash the jug with hot soapy water.

I have also learnt lots more about making candles and will share these tips and recipes that I used in future posts. There are also Candle Making Tutorials and much more besides on the Candle Creations website.