Candy Construction-Pirate Ship

As promised, I have the update for our candy construction project inspired by National Candy Day and Sharon Bowers' book, Candy Construction. During the project, I was reminded how powerful a child's imagination is. I was prepared to 'plant' creative ideas into my niece and nephew's minds to build a pirate ship with candy, but they proved to be the more creative than I even was! Here's the finished project:

I wanted to start with a simple project to get our creative juices flowing, so we built snowmen out of Rice Krispie treats. (If you don't know how to make Rice Krispie Treats, 1) that's sad. 2) check out their website and make some now!)


We just mixed all the ingredients together, let it sit for a few minutes, then globbed a pile on a piece of wax paper for each of us. After forming the balls for the snowmen, we used little candies to decorate the little men. Kenna, who is 3 years old, just really wanted to press every pice of candy into her "snowman". Kellan, age 5, was a little more concerned about the shape of his snowman who wouldn't stand up, so he instead made a "turtle". The whole time, I was thinking that we should be on one of the Rice Krispies commercials on TV...

Snowmen and other candy creatures

Snowman? 

Kellan said that their snowmen "melted". How cute :)

We found out that the Rice Krispie Treats were a little too soft to form into a ship, so we waited about 10 minutes until I could mold the general shape of a ship. Then we had to wait again until that hardened. I thought I was impatient when it came to making candy, but try to get a 3 and 5 year old to be patient while waiting to play with (eat) a table full of candy!!

Finally-decorating time! Peanut butter served as a good glue to stick the items to the ship. I put Sour Gummy Life Savers, Skittles, Starburst, Nerds, mini marshmallows, graham crackers, lollipops, candy sticks, Fruit Roll-Up, whoppers, Mike n' Ikes, candy cigarettes, and candy corn in bowls, and had the kids' halloween candy stash on the side in case we needed more candy. You can never have enough candy if you ask me :)

Lollipop Island
There really is a Nerds treasure inside of the treasure box!

You can see the ship itself, plus we made a lollipop island off to the side where the gummy bears live, guarding the Nerd treasure. The water, a mixture of Skittles, M&M's, & Almond Joy pieces is where the Swedish Fish live--the pirate's main food source of course. The pirates are made up of marshmallows, licorice, and a peach gummy. They stand up with the support of toothpicks, the only non-edible part of this whole project. On board the ship are Whopper cannon balls, Peachie plates (to eat their fish on), candy corn cannons, and marshmallow lights. I tried to explain that pirates probably didn't have electricity on their ships, but that triggered a whole series of "why" questions about electricity that I wasn't prepared to answer, so we settled on the idea that our pirate ship had magic marshmallow lights. It's about creativity right?

If you were "naughty" you had to walk to graham cracker plank
--see the pirate floating in the background.

The best part of this project, like I said earlier, was just watching the kids come up with their own ideas and creating a story for each pirate and each piece of candy they placed on the scene. It may not look perfect like the example in the book, but my first experience of candy construction with my niece and nephew was perfect in my book (or should I say blog?)

Arrr!!!
Kelso the Pirate