Edible Christmas Tree Craft

This was a new craft idea for us this year (I got the idea from this blog) and it was a lot of fun for us a couple of days ago.  All it took was buying some sugar cones and mini m&ms, making green icing, and pulling out the leftover green/red sprinkles.

When everything was laid out and we were ready to start the craft, we decided spontaneously to first dash out of the house to get a drive-through hot chocolate (yes, I could have made it, but there's something rather fun about spontaneously dashing out of the house for hot chocolate!), and then we gathered at the table for hot chocolate and edible crafting.  The kids and I spent almost two hours decorating our forest of mini Christmas trees, some of which we ate and many of which we have frozen.

Note: the icing I made was perfect for this craft because it hardened really well and quite quickly.  It was just my old standby basic icing mixture:  a pat of melted butter; a splash of vanilla; a bunch of icing sugar; and a bit of boiling water.  Because the icing hardened quickly, I regularly added 2-3 drops of hot water to the kids' bowls of icing and stirred it up again...you don't want the icing so stiff that it's hard to spread...although you also don't want it so runny that it just slides down the tree and pools at the bottom...but it was extremely easy to do.

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Ready, set...

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...go!

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After all of the decorating was finished, the kids polished off their remaining icing and mini m&ms...talk about a sugar high!