The Kids in my Kitchen...Christmas Ornaments from Hard Candies!

"The Kids in my Kitchen" is part of an ongoing series where I blog a recipe the kids and I made together. Why do I think it's important for my kids to be in my kitchen with me? Read this.


Today's kitchen adventure is a little bit different. We're not baking a dessert or some other fun treat today...we're using candy to make Christmas ornaments. I got today's idea here.

This project would be a great way to use up leftover Halloween candy you still have hanging around. We didn't have any, so I used a few packages of Jolly Ranchers from Dollarama. Any hard candies would work.

The first job is to sort them into colours.




Then, you crush the hard candies into little pieces. We used a coffee cup.


Jack did not enjoy this part - "Too loud!"

Once the candies are all crushed up ("Ooohhhh, they look like jewels Mommy!")

you spoon them into metal cookie cutters, which are arranged on a oven safe cookie sheet or tray lined with foil.
Please note that for this, you should use cookie cutters you will not need again before the holidays.

Jack stuck to one colour per cookie cutter, while Makenna was all about mixing them up.

I know, it's a terrible picture, but here is each cutter filled with the candy pieces.

Put them in the oven at 350 F for 4-5 mins. This is why your cookie cutters have to be metal - plastic ones would melt in the oven.

It's okay if they leak a bit when they come out. Once they cool and harden you just snap off the excess. It takes about 10 mins for them to cool and harden once out of the oven.

You do not take them out of the cookie cutters. If you try to remove the cookie cutter, what you have created will break into tiny pieces. That's why you want to use cookie cutters you won't need again before the holidays.

Now what you actually do with them is up to you - you could arrange them on your mantle or windowsill or on a shelf. We wanted to hang them on our tree, so we needed to create hangars for them.

We used a hot glue gun to affix ribbon to the backs of the ornaments (you could just use scotch tape too) and...

Beautiful!

Makenna thought this was a really cool project.

All you need are some metal cookie cutters, some hard candies, and some tin foil. Such a quick, inexpensive idea, but some good lessons for kids in it too.

Teachable Moments for Jack, (will be 3 in February): Naming and sorting colours as well as deciding whether or not to mix his colours, and for those colours that did mix, discovering what new colours were created by different combinations.

Teachable Moments for Makenna (turned 6 this past September): Colour Mixing, as well as learning about liquids and solids, something she was learning about in school this past month. When we started, the candies were "solid" states of matter. Placing them in the hot oven turned them to "liquid" states of matter and as they cooled, they retured to a "solid" state.

Both kids also learned a new and fun way to make use of hard candies, which is great if you have a lot but don't like them, or don't like your kids eating them...even though they may want to...they may just like this way of using them even more!