crafty

Unicorn Hot Chocolate Valentines

Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate_Valentines_Day

This year, Miss L went for unicorn themed Valentines… complete with a DIY Unicorn Hot Chocolate kit!

Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate_Valentine_DIY-7.jpg

I’d showed her some photos of the ridiculous Unicorn Hot Chocolate from Creme and Sugar in Anaheim back in January, and she asked if we could make it at home. So when I started looking for all of the ingredients, I realized that we would have an excess of supplies on hand… so why not turn in into a gift!

Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate_Valentine_DIY.jpg

How to make DIY Unicorn Hot Chocolate Kits for Valentine’s Day (or any day really!)

First, we went in search of brightly colored hot chocolate. Upon finding bulk colored hot chocolate via the Internet, Miss L debated between pink, blue and purple. She settled on purple as the perfect color for her classroom Valentines and we packaged up single servings of 3 Tablespoons of cocoa in small glassine bags.

Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate_Valentine_DIY-3.jpg
Next, we made a batch of colorful mini-marshmallows. We started out with some crazy color ideas courtesy of Studio DIY’s tie dye marshmallows and bought food coloring gel online. Then, we followed Alton Brown’s mini-marshmallow recipe to create five different colors of marshmallow goodness. Miss L and I then added the goo to a large Ziploc bag, snipped the corner off, and piped row after row of marshmallow on parchment lined and cornstarch/sugar sprinkled baking sheets.  We sprinkled more of the cornstarch/sugar on the rows and then cut them the next day.

Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate_Valentine_DIY-2.jpg

We had also bought five colors of crazy colored jimmies from the same store that we bought the food coloring. So we dumped a little (OK – A LOT!) of each into a bowl and mixed them together.

We didn’t want anyone to be confused about what they were getting in their packet so we printed little instruction cards on how to assemble the Unicorn Hot Chocolate at home.

Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate_Valentine_DIY-9.jpg

Putting it all together

For the packaging, Miss L created some artwork by tracing a unicorn and added her own Valentine’s Day message.

I scanned the pencil art, resized it in Photoshop, then printed it on glassine bags. She added unique colorful touches to each bag using markers.

Then we filled each one up with a package of purple hot chocolate, colorful marshmallows, sprinkles and an instruction sheet, then sealed then with Valentine’s Day washi tape.

Mug_of_Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate.jpg

We had a blast with making every part of these Valentines, especially the super sticky marshmallows!

Unicorn_Hot_Chocolate_Valentine_DIY-8.jpg

Now we hope all of those first graders love their crazy cup of Unicorn Hot Chocolate they get to make at home!