st. patty’s day sweet rainbow kabobs

It’s no secret that there are more than a few sweet-toothed people living under this roof, so this year we’ll be ringing in St. Patrick’s Day with super-sweet rainbow kabobs!

I loved, loved, loved the sweet St. Patrick’s Day Rainbows that Kate shared earlier this month on Our Best Bites and that I caught on Pinterest.

We’ve played with licorice a bit before, so when I saw the bag of rainbow Twizzlers at the grocery this week, I grabbed them.  And a few marshmallows.  And a bag of Rollos.

But I forgot the cellophane bags, so I had to get creative with Cora.

We put our heads together, and here’s the skinny. . .

• St. Patty’s Day Sweet Rainbow Kabobs: I’ll admit, that I did try some variations of the totally cute  licorice rainbow.

I had our rainbow pieces, our clouds, and our gold at the end of our rainbow.

But nothing worked.

I tried cutting and tooth-picking and cutting more and squeezing and shoving in a ziplock bag.

 Our rainbow was beautiful. . .

 . . . but we just couldn’t get it to stay put.

And then I tried not cutting and shoving in a fold-and-close bag, but nothing worked.  My bags were too small and nothing would hold in a rainbow shape because of the ziplock zipper thing.

Then I tried using toothpicks again on the bottoms and the top of the rainbow, but it got too pokey.  And my marshmallows kept falling off.

So I opened up a drawer, grabbed some wooden skewers, and turned our rainbows into kabobs.

Woot! An answer!  We love kabobs over here!

Cora, my kitchen helper, puts colors in rainbow order,

and she counts how many we needed.

Cora helped me with the counting of our rainbow pieces, clouds, and gold.

our rainbow kabobs. . . gorgeous

I said, Okay, we have five people in our family–Daddy, Maddy, Owen, you, and me.  So we need five rainbow kabobs total.    I can cut one Twizzler in half, and that will be perfect for two kabobs.  Let’s think about how many Twizzlers we need for one kabob, and then we can figure out how many Twizzlers we will need total.

The math piece was hard for her, and I didn’t push it. I talked through it as I cut and organized.  She’s almost five, so we counted and counted and I focused instead on using math vocabulary and talking about the order of the colors of the rainbow.

We looked at the rainbow on the plate–our pokey toothpick one–and I asked her to gather one of each color and then to put the colors in order, using our first rainbow as a model.  She did it and with ease; copying the colors and following the pattern is a super-important math skill, though, so I was happy.  Heck, I was happy just hanging in the kitchen with my tiniest, playing with candy. And who wouldn’t be?

Our rainbow kabobs consisted of a half of each color of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, two Rollos for our gold at the end of the rainbow, and two marshmallows for our clouds.  Beautiful.

Were they perfect? Nope.

Was every one the same? Nope.

But who really cares when you’re celebrating a happy holiday like St. Patrick’s Day?

When Cora and I surprise Maddy and Owen and my husband with these on Saturday, we’ll all be lucky!

And? Who doesn’t want a little unicorn to go along with this rainbow kabob?  Definitely check out my pal’s Easy Unicorn Craft for kids for a not-so-sweet rainbow themed craft!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone!!

And if you want some more super-fun St. Patty’s Day ideas, check out the two Pinterest boards that I contribute to: St. Patrick’s Day (collaborative board, started by Bern of Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas) and st. patrick’s day (my own!).