Rebecca's New Hobby

I wanted to find a way to include Rebecca in my Holiday Candy Making Mania.  Julia is now 15 and Queen of all Things Hard Candy, and Rebecca at 10 needed to find her own fun way to be involved.  So I took some of my old hard candy molds which turned out to be a little impractical, either too large to eat or to complicated to pour, and let her use them to make painted chocolates. 

This is something that she can do on her own safely with the microwave, and she turns out beautiful and tasty additions to our holiday assortments.  It is moderately messy, but some scrubbing is a small price to pay for these fancy treats.

I purchased some good quality melting chocolate from Sam's Club in milk and white, and 3 colors of wafers from the grocery store.  The candy wafers are made specifically for this purpose.

Rebecca melts 5 candy wafers at a time in the microwave by stirring every 20 seconds until fully melted.  She then uses a paint brush to paint a design directly onto the mold.  She lets each color set before adding a new color.  After she is done painting the mold, she melts the high quality chocolate and pours it over the melted design.  For lollipops she adds a stick at this time.

After allowing the chocolates to set up , she pops them out of the molds. 

Since everybody loves chocolate, she doesn't want to waste any, so with the leftover melted chocolate she makes other treats like chocolate drizzled pretzels or chocolate dipped candy canes.

Rebecca is having a ball making these, and now the challenge is keeping her sisters from eating them all before Thanksgiving even gets here, let alone Christmas!