Discovering 2014: Edible Glitter

Discovering 2014 is a personal goal to complete a daily project throughout the year!

Today's project was Edible Glitter (homemade sprinkles), which came from this pin by She Knows. I honestly used more suggestions from the comments than from the original directions in the article, and it came out wonderfully that way.

Here's a VERY important thing to remember with this project: do NOT use wax paper! It could start a fire. Make sure you're using parchment paper in your oven.

I got four smaller bowls, sugar, measuring cup, baking pan, food coloring, parchment paper, and grapefruit spoons (though I'm sure any spoon would work). The oven should be pre-heated to 310°F (which is 285°F in a convection oven).

Since the bowls I used were pretty small, I only used 1/4 cup of sugar in each. Then I put in a few drops of food coloring. 4-6 drops should be plenty. If you're doing multiple bowls, make sure you do only one at a time, so the food coloring doesn't dry up in the ones you're not working on.

At first it will clump (like above), but just mush it down and mix, mush and mix, mush and mix.

Keep doing this until you think you've mixed it as thoroughly as you can.

Put the parchment paper (again, NOT wax paper!!) on your baking pan. I did two colors at a time, and thinly spread them out on the paper (give them a mix first to make sure they didn't clumped from sitting in the bowl). In hindsight I should have pre-cut the paper in half (made it easier to get back in the bowl at the end), but once it cooled I was able to carefully cut it.

The cook times I saw were between 8-10 minutes. I tried both 8 minutes and 10 minutes and saw no difference. Whichever you choose, set a timer for the halfway point (either 4 or 5 minutes) and pull the pan out when it goes off. The sugar will have clumped up some; gently break it apart and then put it back in for the remainder of its cook time.

Once its done allow about 10-15 minutes of cooling before you store it. There shouldn't be anymore clumps but it doesn't hurt to try and break it up the best you can. Mine still had a few tiny clumps here and there but overall it looked very nice (and tasted like... sprinkles!).

Tomorrow's project is Italian Cookies. Gee, I wonder what sprinkles I could use on the icing? :)