Easy Peasy Frozen Paint Cubes

Blog
24/06/2018

Yey, ‘easy peasy’ are my fave adjectives at minute….. I’ve had so many kitchen disasters since starting at Little Learners (notatallpurple purple mash, solidified custard mound, lumpy semolina and non gloopy jam gloop!) that I thought I’d try something that even I can manage.

I was browsing on Pintrest and saw some nice looking G&T lollies and thought ‘mmmm yeah I can manage that’ but then realised I’d strayed well off the original reason I was on that site!!!!  Anyway it got me thinking, I have used ice in my trays before and I love the look on the babies’ faces when they get the shock of the coldness but then the fascination of it melting.  I removed the gin and tonic elements (don’t worry I drank them later that day) to make them more child friendly and decided to freeze water and food colouring.  Wasn’t great.  The food colouring didn’t really make the water that colourful so it just left the paper all soggy.  I then tried paint and it that worked brilliantly (almost… still need to think up a way to keep them cold while i’m setting up…)

Anyway if you want some tips on how to make frozen paint cubes read on….

You will need:

• paint
• ice cube trays
• lolly sticks
• a freezer (you need to have a bit of extra space in the freezer as the lolly sticks take up a lot of room).

It’s so easy, squeeze the paint into the ice cube trays (I’ve decided to layer mine so I just used a small amount of paint at first but you could go for whole cubes of one colour if you want).

Put the tray in the freezer before you put the lolly sticks in.  I tried it a with the sticks in first but they just kept falling out and making a mess!

Once you get the first tray and sticks in you can even put another tray on top (the tray on top is one i made earlier).

Leave them for an hour or so then top up with another colour and just keep repeating this until your trays are full.  If you want even deeper cubes, pop the frozen cubes out (this was harder than expected… try not to yank on the stick as they can break or come out of the cube) and put more paint in the bottom of the tray and then gently put the frozen cubes back on top.

They were a bit of a mushy mess 2 hours after taken them out of the freezer but we did get some good marks out of them.

They do look quite tasty, so please make sure your little one isn’t sucking on them for too long!

I’ve got more in the freezer so I think I’ll find an ice pack and an insulated bag for next week.  I’ll let you know how it goes and will update with some more pictures of our amazing mark making!

Have a go and share your pics with me!

Thanks Kirsty,

Little Learners Wearside and Hartlepool.

UPDATE…… To keep your cubes frozen for longer keep them in the tray with an ice pack on top and one underneath.