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Our kitchen now has a cotton candy machine.  The textural and visual effect this adds to a dessert is great, but the surprise element is even better.  When we tell guests that the cotton candy is bacon-flavoured, for example, they are usually thinking there is no way that cotton candy is going to taste like bacon. 

There are 2 ways we have found to flavour cotton candy.  The first is by cooking the isomalt sugar with a flavouring liquid.  For example, juice some beets and cook the sugar with the beet juice before spinning it.  The advantage this method has is that you also get the colour to go along with the flavour.  The second method is by emulsifying fat with the sugar.  For the bacon candy, a bacon stock is made with the meat once the fat is rendered out, and this stock is cooked with the sugar.  Then the bacon fat is emulsified with the bacon sugar with the help of a little glycerin.

There are also a few other, simpler ways to flavour the candy.  Powders can be sprinkled over the finished cotton candy, or the sugar can be infused with flavouring agents (vanilla) before being spun in the machine.