Planting Jellybeans with a Sprinkle of Fairy Dust

If you follow me on Pinterest, you may have seen the too-cute magic jellybean cake that I pinned. I loved the idea, but for me a whole cake was too much work and dessert. So, I decided to remake the idea to fit our family.

Supplies: Cupcake liners, sprinkles, jellybeans, Dum-Dums, Oreos, “dirt”, and a little bit of magic

First, we made some “dirt”. After all, dirt makes more sense than a cake, right? I didn’t follow the traditional recipe for dirt because I wanted the mixture to be a little thicker to make sure the sprouted jellybeans wouldn’t fall over. I also wanted a simpler, cheaper, and toddler-friendly (i.e. less sugar) recipe.

1 pkg of cream cheese, softened and whipped
1 pkg of instant chocolate pudding prepared with 1 3/4 cups milk
Oreos

Add the cream cheese to the pudding and mix. Then crush a couple Oreos and fold in. You can also add chocolate chips (rocks), coconut (worms), or whatever else your kids like. My mixture came out a little lumpy (I didn’t whip the cream cheese first, oops), but dirt is lumpy so who cares!

Take cupcake liners and have your child stick an Oreo in the bottom (this step is important!). Then “plant” a jellybean on top and cover the jellybeans with the dirt mixture.

The Oreos stabilize the cupcake liners and help keep the Dum-Dums from falling over.

After planting the jellybeans, reveal the magic fairy dust (sprinkles). I used a mixture of colored sugar and Easter themed sprinkles in one of our miniature tea cups. Ben was skeptical (“That’s not fairy dust – it’s sprinkles!”), but he was more than happy to pretend since candy was involved.

I let Ben use a baby spoon to sprinkle the fairy dust on our planted jellybeans.

Our Easter themed cupcake wrappers came with decorated toothpicks, so we put those in too. Ben was insistent that we needed to use them. At this point, I told Ben that we would have to put the planted jellybeans in the fridge overnight to see if anything would happen . . .

While he was sleeping, our local fairy went to the fridge and inserted unwrapped Dum-Dum lollipops making sure that they went into the Oreos so that they wouldn’t topple over. (Note: The lollipops do get a little sticky sitting overnight. If you can trust your local fairy to get up early and remember, you may want to schedule a morning visit. Unfortunately, our fairy is worthless before her two cups of coffee.)

The look of delighted surprise the next morning made this bit of magic worth it all. And, our sprouted jellybeans made the perfect Sunday afternoon treat.

Some other magical growing candy ideas: Nerds into a rock candy sucker, small colored marshmallow into a Peep on a stick (or a little marshmallow into a big marshmallow), a chocolate chip or egg into a chocolate bunny sucker, or a candy bar flavored egg (ex. Snickers, Butterfinger, etc.) grows into a larger matching candy bar flavored egg.

Magical Candy Easter basket idea: With your child, plant the candy “seeds” using some of the ideas above in the bottom of an Easter basket, cover with grass, sprinkle with some fairy dust. While your child is sleeping, shake out the seeds and dust and replace with matching larger candy (or larger quantities. Just don’t let your child “plant” too much {ha}!

The activities that inspired this post: Magic Jellybean Cake and Magic Jellybeans (includes a cute “Magic Jellybean” seed packet printout).

Linked to:
Learn and Play
Tuesday Tots
It’s Playtime