So deefour, look like disco dust to you?

I'm with you BlakesCakes. Plastic is not edible in my neck of the woods either. If you do a little research you will find that disco dust is "non-toxic for non-edible food decorations only". Please, Please, Please people stop putting disco dust on food products.

No one has put it on, we are just wondering how they are made, but it looks like they are not being truthful in all edible!

As soon as i can find some Gum arabic, I will be trying this with edible sparkles. Wont be as intense, but nice none the less!

motherofgrace; All I can say is the product I scraped off floated in the water. Disco, pixie, fairy dust. If it floats ....what. Does anyone out there know of an fda approved product that shimmers like that? I have the fda approved brand of luster dust and I put some on a piece of chocolate and the look doesn't come close. I put that in some water and after a few minutes it dissolved. Their website says its a mixture of several products. We may never know. On the hard candy it did have a sandpaper feel to it, but I could not get anything scraped off without breaking it. So maybe there is sugar on that. I have to order some real edible glitter and get back to what I love.

Trying to revive this thread; has anyone figured it out? I have a friend who has fallen in love with these, but I don't want to roll them about in disco dust. I was hoping someone found an edible way to do it!

This thread might have some useful info:
http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-ftopict-725565-disco.html+dust

Thank you! I was just on that thread; I think I'm going to have to play around with a few things and see if she likes any of them. The bedazzled bon bons are beautiful but I'm not certain I'd like to eat them personally...

Hi all, I have been doing some R&D and I believe I have figured out how the bonbons are bedazzled. I will duplicate the findings and photograph after thanksgiving holiday.

It seems to me that you can't get the look of the bonbons using sanding sugars because the water based food coloring will dissolve the sugars. But then I realized that when your dealing with chocolate water is an issue so one must use candy colors that do not have water. I have yet to try that with the sanding sugars, but I feel that no matter how much you grind the sanding sugar and color them they will still have a noticeable texture (theory not proven).

I melted chocolate and got some candy molds, then I sprinkled 3 of them with a mixture. One with ground up sanding sugar w/disco dust, one with the sanding sugar, and one with just disco dust. I then poured the chocolate into the molds, let them set and released them from the molds once they were set.

The sanding sugar looked like sanding sugar and not like the bonbons.
The sanding sugar with disco dust had a similar appearance to the bonbons.
The one with just disco dust was the most intense and similar to the bonbons.

My conclusion is that they may add some sanding sugars to the mix of disco dust but they can not get that look without the disco dust.

I will do one more test of coloring the sanding sugar and adding it to the chocolate molds in ground up form and add it to a mixture of disco dust. I will also use luster as one has suggested, but I doubt luster would produce facets that sparkle.

Okay until then, hope that helped.

Hi everyone, I hope your new year will be a safe one. I have been working on the bon bons or in my case cake ball bedazzle project and to much success I got very positive feedback from those that ate them. First of all, I found that when using the disco dust, one must realize that although they are not food they are safe to consume in small quantities since they are inert. That means they do not digest and just pass through you. Just as embellishing cakes, chocolates, and desserts with gold or sliver leaf, neither is edible yet they are used without issues to health. With that in mind here are the pics of some of the cake truffles that I made and they looked so much like Christmas ornaments, yet I used so little on each one. I will post the pics in the cake section. hope that helps.

here is the 2nd attempt with much better success. They are not grainy and look just like christmas ornaments. The guest were hovering over them and when served they disappeared as fast as you could say "eat". A great hit. Sorry that the photo is not a very good one. It is difficult to photograph them since they reflect a lot of light.

So very sorry to hear that these are covered in fine grain plastic glitter..........

I suspected that this would be the only way to get a similar result.

There's just no way to justify covering food in plastic glitter, no matter how hard one tries to minimize that fact.
It's NOT the same as edible silver and/or gold. Those are minerals. Plastic is NOT a mineral.

Sure hope that these disturbing trends in decorating die out soon.......so tired of explaining that disco dust is just craft glitter and has no place on food.......


Rae

I have bought a couple of pots of glitter...Rainbow dust by the sparkle range, and the company does say its not edible but I can't find an ingredient list when I google it. And no I haven't taken the time to email and ask the company myself. The place I bought it from told me that its made from Mica, a mineral. If you read down in this link it says its in makeup and even toothpaste. Now I know you are not supposed to eat make up and toothpaste but is it possible not all glitter is made from plastic?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica

Sorry in advance for "stirring the pot"!

Well, high quality glitter is made from GLASS, so, no, not all glitter is made of plastic, but if you look at disco dust under a microscope, or a very good magnifying glass, you'll see crisp edges and regular shapes.

Mica is very fragile. It powders easily and it's irregular in shape. Shake up tiny bits of it together & you get powder, not regularly shaped grains.

No, disco dust isn't made from mica, although some glitters do contain trace metals.

Does it really matter? Would you want to eat something rolled in your favorite eye shadow? Personally, I don't................

Rae

i dont think the rules between the uk and the us are all that different, I buy disco dust glitters from a company called Edable art, and there just up the road from me, and the products are listed as Non toxic Non Edible for decoration only! its quite decieving however given the name of the company is Edable art , but its spaced as Ed able art , like its the guys name insted of edible.

I remember when disco dust first became the rage a few years back.
I searched online and one of the places that I found it was at Edable Art.
At that time, there seemed to be no guidelines and I couldn't find it here in the US, so I actually e-mailed Edable Art about getting some.
I THOUGHT IT WAS, INDEED, EDIBLE!!!!! NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've always felt that I wasn't the only one initially caught in the confusion.

We're all exposed to non-toxics on a daily basis.
Yes, we passively consume some of them, but we're not DELIBERATELY eating them--unless we have a medical/psychological problem called a pica!
How can anyone deliberately serve what are, honestly, copious amounts of them to a person who will have NO IDEA that what they're consuming is plastic glitter???????

It's beyond me.
Rae
[/u]

I see FDA Approved a lot in this thread.... know that there are different levels of FDA approval for pigments and ingredients. Craft (many), Cosmetic (several), Food (some) - ALL many be non-toxic - but as has been discussed all are NOT food grade.

That's my big frustration with the disco glitters. Yes, they are the only way I know to get that effect - but the application and use must be very judicious.

I've eaten and held the bon bons in question.... and I work in the cosmetic industry as well... I've got literally dozens of jars cosmetic glitter and disco sparkle in my art studio. And all I can say is that the bon bon glitter behaves in EXACTLY the same way as the cosmetic and disco glitters.

Sometimes if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck........

Even though a product may be "inert" how do we know it stays that way going through the digestive track.... I'm not a chemist or a biologist, but what do my stomach acids do to plastic glitter?

Okay, I am reviving this thread. What they use is, is mica. It is edible. It's what they put in lipstick. It can also be FDA approved for food items. I saw it used on cakes and it has complete metalic, straight up glitter look. It's really pretty and the FDA approved stuff cost a grip of money. Sorry, I can not remember what the product is called.

I'm still highly skeptical.

While I agree that Mica is a very common ingredient in food-safe pearls (as well as non-toxic decoration colors and cosmetics).... I have not seen it have anywhere near the same reflective properties as polyester glitter.

From a marketing standpoint, the person who developed a high-refraction 100% FDA food-grade glitter that approaches the performance of polyester glitter would be a rich man.

Okay, I saw this with my actual eyes. It is a highly reflective "glitter". I can see how the Bedazzle chocolates got their shine. Now I asked if it was FDA approved and they said yes. Are they telling the truth, I don't know, but she is very well know sugar artist and would lose a lot of face if she lied. And like I said, it's not cheap. It was $55 for I think and ounce or two.