Chocolate Bark - Halloween Candy Edition

Last Easter I stumbled upon an Easter candy chocolate bark - it was gorgeously colored but made me think nothing but "Ewwww, can we say excessive". Although it was right up my friend Amber's alley so I sent her the link :). She made it for her annual kids Easter hunt and it was devine. So I decided to make a Halloween edition with Tristyn.

We used some various halloween candy bars and incorporated them into our pretzel chocolate bark. Super simple & fun!

We started with a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, then spread on a generous heap of melting chocolate. We used Wilton brand candy melts. Next time I'd use a better quality chocolate for the base.

We then sprinkled broken pretzel pieces, M&M's and chopped up random chocolates, pressed them into the base chocolate a bit and let the bark chill in the fridge for a spell. An hour later we checked and it was begging to be broken up into but size chunks and sampled.

We plan in doing this again at Christmas using chocolate candies in an appropriate color scheme.

Salt Painting

Today we did some salt painting for a fun project. We started off using school glue to make a random design on large art paper. Thicker paper works best - but we weren't going archival quality here so I used what we had on hand.

We then covered the entirety of the glue design with table salt. Once completely covered, the excess was tapped off. I poured it into a ramekin to save for the next piece - which I did on my own while Tristyn finished hers. What can I say, it looked fun! I let her dump the salt in the bin when I finished covering my design.

The final step is to dip a paintbrush in water color and let the paint seep into the salt. Mixing colors is fun as well as playing with the intensity of the colors by adding more or less water. The salt picks up the paint and it travels as far as the colored water can until it's absorbed.

The best part of this project is because each step is totally fun and kid friendly my 4 year old completely did it herself from start to finish and there's no waiting :)