Weather you have a house full of kiddos like me or just one, you’ve got crayons. I don’t know about your kids, but prior to my making them all their own little crayon rolls, we had a crayon mess all the time. The box we kept them in got dumped out often and crayons got broken on a regular basis. Of course this doesn’t happen anymore, but I still have a box half full of broken crayons collecting dust and I despise waste!

So I went in search of ideas for those crayon bits and after finding tutorials like this in about 100 different blogs I decided I’d try it.. my own way of course. I feel I must mention this tutorial though, because it was different. I would have done something like it but ended up not having enough crayon bits to make it work.

Everything I read said preheat oven to 350 and break out the muffin tin. But since I always put my oven on hiatus over the summer and use it as a storage shed for baking pans, I used the toaster oven instead and I didn’t preheat it. I also used my mini muffin pan instead of the regular one.. sadly I don’t use the mini much so I didn’t mind getting crayon bits in it.

So I peeled, broke up and evenly distributed my crayon bits into my mini muffin pan. Only had enough bits to fill 6 little cups but that’s ok. Slid it into the toaster oven, put in on 350 and about 5 minutes later I had little bowls of crayon soup that smelled .. well they smelled like something alright. Stuck the pan into the fridge and about 15 minutes later we had 6 little crayon cakes that resembled smallish peanut butter cups.

I must say, they are a big hit! This was an amusing thing to do on a rainy morning that ended up keeping them quiet and occupied for over an hour! (which is an amazing thing in momland!)

ETA 7/3/09: My almost 11 month old oddly didn’t try to eat these! He actually sat at the table with us and was rubbing them on the paper!!