Elmo's (pretzel) crayons

As I mentioned before, I LOVE planning birthday parties and can spend hours looking for ideas online. The idea for J's 2nd birthday party came from Our Best Bites shortly after we celebrated his first birthday. I saw these edible crayons and immediately fell in love with them; I knew I wanted to make them, just needed an excuse. 

I settled on a Crayola theme for his birthday a couple of months ago and had been planning on using a combination of red, yellow, green and blue for all his other decorations. J loves Elmo and while watching Elmo's World one day I got the idea to tie Elmo and the Crayola theme together, since one of Elmo's favorite things is crayons!

I found a lot of cool ideas on Pinterest, but the hit of the party was definitely the crayons! While I originally found them on Our Best Bites, a quick search took me to a post by nickwilljack with clear instructions and a PDF file of the crayon wrappers. I didn't want to buy a huge pack of colored paper, so I just had copies made at Staples of the different colors I needed.

I used my trusty paper cutter to cut the labels and decided on using honey wheat pretzels so I wouldn't have to cut the pretzel rods. I personally would've preferred the salty-sweet combination of the regular pretzel rods, but my guests didn't seem to mind and really enjoyed this combination 


I started by melting the different colored Candy Melts in the microwave. To avoid ugly white splotches on your candy, add a couple of fresh candy discs to your melted chocolate and stir (something to do with melting them at high temperature) or melt them using the stove-top method. Dip one end of the pretzel in the melted candy and swirl it around. Dip the other end and place the pretzel on any flat surface covered in wax paper. Let them dry before moving on to the next step.

Cut a piece of clear tape (about an inch and a half) and place it at the end of the wrapper, making sure that only half of it is on the paper, lengthwise. Roll wrapper over pretzel and secure with the half of the tape that's off the paper.

While making these was a bit time-consuming, once I started doing it and figured out a system it really wasn't difficult to do. Seeing how much everybody loved them definitely made them worth the effort!