{Harold and the Purple Crayon}

This little project did not go so well. Bubby had fun though, so really, that's what counts. It has now become a mission of mine to make purple crayons successfully. We'll see what happens.

 This is what we started out with.

 So far we're doing good. As we were working I was playing dumb to get Bubby involved. 

I explained what we were making and showed him what we had to work with. Then I would say something like "....hm, I wonder how we put the chocolate on the pretzels." and then I would try to stick a chocolate chip on the end of a pretzel. I'd play along trying out his suggestions until he came up with something that would work. Problem solving at it's best!

 Once the chocolate chips were melted I asked him how we should make it purple. He knew right away to use food coloring (we've been using it a lot to make play dough and bathtub paints). I pretended like I had completely forgot to buy purple food coloring and eventually he thought to mix colors together, though he couldn't remember which colors to use.

 It was at this point that everything went down hill. Once we were trying to mix in the food coloring, our nice smooth chocolate turned into the consistency of soft play dough. We tried making some on the stove instead, same problem. Finally I dug out some red candy melts that had been in the cupboard for a while. Melted them, added blue food coloring. Same problem!! Has anyone else had this issue? I have no idea if it's really the food coloring or if I am just completely incapable of melting chocolate. Or maybe it's from stirring it too much?

 I remembered seeing another blog post where someone used frosting instead of chocolate. So I pulled a can of white frosting out of the cupboard, we added food coloring and finally got some kind of reasonable results.

 Our dipped pretzels. This worked ok. I put them in the freezer to harden the frosting overnight so we could wrap them. The down fall is that as soon as we brought them out they started to soften and made a huge mess.

 The link I used to print our paper is on my FIAR page under Harold and the Purple Crayon. I used some scrapbooking paper, something lighter weight would have been easier to use but it's what I had. I pre-rolled the paper around a pencil to make it easier for Bubby to use.

 He rolled, I held, he taped. They look cute, they taste good, and it was a fun activity to tie into the book so we'll just call it good.

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