Instead of Candy!

Today is Easter and I have been meaning to make this post for a while so here we go.

I am not sure about you, but by the time Easter rolls around I am tired of candy. We have Halloween, than eat crazy for Thanksgiving, next we have Christmas and in my husbands family they fill stockings with small items and load it up with candy. Once

we recover from Christmas it is C Valentines day which of course means more candy. Than there is Easter.

On Friday my husband took the girls to the coast to visit his parents for an over night trip and I stayed home. My mom came over and we pulled down the box of accumulating candy and I threw it away it was old and gross and no one was eating it. I took some Valentine candy and filled the Easter eggs.

A while ago on Pinterest I say an alternative to Valentines candy. Someone had the marvelous idea to take their old crayons peel them, cut them up, put them in a heart shaped mold made out of silicone - it almost looked like an ice cube tray - and she put the tray in her oven at 230 degrees for 15 minutes and came out multi colored heart shaped crayons. GENIUS!

For Easter I went to Joanns and got an egg shaped silicone mold that I am sure is used for candy making. Than I went to dollar store got some crayons. My 2 girls and my husband helped me peel the crayons and the girls thought it was fun to break them up.

This is my mixed up broken crayons that we worked on as a family!

This is the silicone Mold. Yes it needs to be silicone it is easier to work with. I discovered that you need to put the mold on a cookie sheet. It is easier to remove from the oven.

Here is what the mold looks like when it is filled with the broken crayons. After the molds are filled you place in the oven at 230 degrees for 15 minutes. My girls had fun helping me put the crayons in the mold. Again place the mold on the cookie sheet.

Here is the finished product. It is a crayon that the kids will have fun with. After I pulled the mold from the oven I put in the freezer. I had to make 36 eggs for the girls preschool class so I needed to get them hard fast to make another set.

I believe this was the second batch. I place these eggs inside of large Easter eggs for the a the egg hunt, but there is no reason why you could not hide them like this. The best part is if you don't find them all you don't have to worry about ants or smells. It will be a fun surprise later in the year!

I used Dollar Store crayons and they worked just find, but there was a layer of wax that was on the flat side to the crayone that was milky in color with out an color. I know Crayola would work a lot better, but I was on a tight budget this year.

I plan on looking for other molds for different holidays. Instead of candy at Halloween I was thinking it would be fun to find pumpkin and ghost molds and pass them out to the neighborhood kids. The only secret is to find different molds.