Crayon Cakes

Today I ventured out from my "I don't have any clue how to be adventurous with preschoolers" mode and did something very radical.  I melted crayons to create a whole new look and purpose.  They were really quite easy.    I have been "collecting" crayons for years now.  Every summer I would buy new crayons for the kids each year during July and August (when school supplies go on sale ~ my favorite time of year) but I would refuse to throw the old ones away.  I just new they would serve a purpose one of these days.  Inevitably, we would end up adding the new crayons to the mix of old crayons because someone would destroy their box or lose too many to make them truly useful to their school work.  So I had years of broken crayons in a little plastic shoe box.  It was finally time to put them to good use.

The first thing I did was determine that I was going to make these for Pinky Poo.  She loves to color but her little hands struggle with even the big toddler size crayons.  Crayola nows makes crayons that fit toddler hands but they are expensive in my book.  So these new crayons cakes belong to Pink.

The second thing I did was get down to business.  Here are the supplies you will need:

          * old crayons
          * muffin tins
          * Exacto knife (optional)

Here is the procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Peel all the paper off the crayons.  This was much easier and faster to do with the exacto knife.  I simply made a slit down the side with the knife and it peeled right off.

3.   Break the crayons into smaller pieces.

4.  Divide them out into the separate muffin tin slots.  You have options here.  You can either match all the colors or mix and match for some fun adventurous coloring.  I decided to do both.  We have some that are all one color and some that are mixed and matched.  I decided to do this so that when we work on learning colors she can clearly see the difference.

4.  Turn the oven off and simply set the muffin tin in there.  The crayons will melt within 10 minutes.

5.  Remove from oven and let cool for a few minutes.  They will begin to set at this point.

6.  Finally, take the muffin tin to the freezer.  They will become permanently set within about 30-45 minutes.

Once you remove them from the freezer they should fall right out of the muffin tin (although you might have a few stubborn ones that a small knife could encourage to come out.)  Mine came out looking like colorful Reece's Peanut Butter cups.