Thank you for this question/response!
1. I use both sweetener and Cotton Candy, in virtually everything I make, just like the real world does in our food. Why? it tastes better. I have a slight preference for the cotton candy. Tastes better to me, but if you look through my recipes, I use both almost equally.
2. I know exactly what you mean by thin, and it's why I often add creams and vanillas to my mixes. They taste "thicker," to me, whether they are or not.
3. While it not 100% true that flavor is not affected, it's pretty much a taste thing. The creams and vanillas add to and enhance the flatter flavors, like most fruits, and many other single ingredient base flavorings. While you can detect vanilla and cream, they potentiate to expand the base flavoring. The Grape becomes "more grape," for example. So, while you can taste vanilla and cream, because you get "more grape", you don't experience a significant flavor change, but, rather, a more expansive,richer, thicker, creamier grape. I don't know why adding nuances to flavors causes them to expand and become richer, I just know that is what it does, from experience. Also, remember, that taste is totally subjective. The flavors I add and the percentages I use may not be exactly right for you, and that is what makes the journey so interesting to me. You literally HAVE TO figure out your blends yourself for your taste.
I'll give you another example. Try making chocolate using chocolate flavoring. If you can do it without vanillas and cream, I'd like to hear about it. Chocolate was tough for a long time until I began to think about what chocolate really is. Take a delicious milk chocolate, for example. Sure it cacao/chocolate, but that a very bitter taste until you add dairy, vanilla and sweetener, and then it tastes like the familiar chocolate we all love. Flavors work the same way. They are base flavors and must be enhanced with supporting flavors to get them to where you want them. This has been my experience and one of the primary ways that caused my juice to go from lousy to pretty good, I think. I like it.
In an earlier post, a member listed the ingredients for a recipe to make a flavoring like cake for example. How can you make cake without a base, sweetness, eggs, dairy, butter, creams, etc.? Doesn't work unless you do. This doesn't mean that you have to always use all of these ingredients, only that enhancing base flavors is what makes juice great. So very few of the TFA flavors taste spectacular out of the bottle, as single ingredients, at least they don't to me. But add a little of this and that, and suddenly....MAGIC JUICE! So, play around with it yourself and see if it works for you. Maybe the vanillas and creams will so change the flavoring for you that you won't want to go that way...and, of course, that's fine. But give it a try and see if you like it, is all. Best of luck and kindest regards, my friend!
