What a Bunch of Suckers!

Do you remember all of those fun Christmas activities that you grew up doing as a child? Dipping chocolates? Making gingerbread houses? Stringing popcorn for the tree?
Well, Eve and I both have fond memories of painting candy molds. Me with my aunt and cousins, and her with her mom. We both thought it would be such a fun Christmas activity to do this with our kiddies. One day last week we ventured out with our brood, and spent a combined $60.00 for this festive event. Yes, that is a lot of money, but who can put a price on memories? Right? We were full of anticipation and hope that we would be building lasting memories for our children. We were for sure going to be the best mommies in their eyes, if only for a little while. Possibly, this would be a Christmas tradition in the making, to pass down to their children as well.



Wow, were we delusional....



First off, this little endeavor took a lot more effort than I remember. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get 5 and 6 year olds to paint little drips of colored chocolate into a plastic mold with a paint brush is? Secondly, Emma had everyone in a tizzy because she kept mixing her colors together causing a nice shade of poop brown. She ended up using her own paint tray. That brings me to the next problem. Those little paint trays we bought only hold one candy "chip" at a time, making it impossible to paint more than two or three strokes without needing more. So, Eve had a brilliant idea. She just put a ton of colored candy in a big bowel and microwaved it all together. That took FOREVER. Those little things don't melt very quickly. The troops were getting restless. They all started yelling different things; "I need brown!" "No, I need pink, first" Connor was usually always saying, "What's taking so long?"



Some of of candy suckers used the standard white stick, others used cool big pretzel sticks. The only problem was that it was impossible to keep the pretzels in the candy mold covered with chocolate long enough for them to dry. Hayden came of with a very clever idea of staking odds and end underneath his pretzel sticks to hold them in place.



After about 45 minutes of this, I started to wonder if we were doing something wrong. It just didn't seem to be going as smoothly as I remembered as a child. I remember kicking out mold after mold full of delightfully colored chocolates, and we were almost an hour into this and still had not produced one single sucker. Hmmmmmmm. What to do?? I decided to look at the instructions we had so freely thrown away. Apparently, we were to supposed to refrigerate those little puppies once they were full of chocolate. Well, that wasn't going to work, so we put them outside.



Now we were left with a terrible mess. Multicolored caked on chocolate was all over everything. Eve had to use scalding water to clean off the glasses and spoons. It is still stuck in the grooves of her table, I am not sure how she is going to get that out.

After 30 minutes of chilling outside, we decided to bring in the suckers. I have to admit, I did not have high hopes. I expected each little sucker to fall into a million pieces when we took them out of the molds. But much to my surprise, I was wrong. It was a Christmas miracle! Okay, not quite that big, but exciting all the same. The kids were so happy to see their little creations. Emma was so happy with her brown and yellow swirled Cinderella on a stick. Natalie's hearts looked tie-dyed, too cute to eat, and Max made the cutest little airplane and train. Connor had a baseball and football that really turned out well too. Zoe and Sophie's looked like perfect little lollipops. They all turned out so well.

After all of the mess, those little suckers actually turned out. I am so surprised. I wonder if my kids will look back on this experience and think of it as a fun one, or if they will just forget it? Maybe when Eve and I did this as a child it was a horrible, messy event too, but, as we get older we only remember the fun?