The tree was down, the bathrooms were clean, the laundry - well the laundry is never ending, but under control. So, what to do with a long New Year's Eve afternoon?
Clean out the cupboards, of course. And, in our house, that means finding some creative way to use up all the open, left-over holiday odds and ends, like for instance the open bag of peanut butter chips and partial bag of pretzels left from making pretzel stick stars for the preschool Sunday school class.
When I made the stars, I noticed how well they held together once the melted peanut butter chips re-hardened, and thought it would be fun to try a three dimensional project, too.
A little bit of searching to a blueprint for a spaghetti and marshmallow tower from Scott Bedford's Made by Dad: 67 Blueprints for Making Cool Stuff (click here to see the page in Google images), that seemed nicely adaptable to pretzel sticks and melted peanut butter chips.
We didn't have the book, and our building materials were different, so while we followed the general pattern, the actual building was by trial and error.
We placed out the initial foundation squares...
...connecting them...
...with melted peanut butter chips, piped on from a plastic baggie.
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| 40 seconds in the microwave, and stir. |
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| snip a small corner for piping |
...to connect across the base squares...
...as the first step in turning each square into a pyramid (in progress in the pictures).
As well as the bottom 4x3 rectangle, we also made a 2x3...
...a 1x2...
...and a single square with triangle "buttresses" coming out the sides (ignore the right angle piece, we took that off)...
...to stack up, and peanut butter chip together, into the bottom part of our tower.
While that hardened, we worked on the top part of the tower...
...which we (very carefully) attached to the base. It turns out, that piping melted peanut butter chips onto set peanut butter chip joints, causes the set joints to melt - leading to a near catastrophe...
...and a slightly sloppier, if entirely edible, edifice than we had originally envisioned.
It leans a little, the joints are globby, and there are a few fallen pretzel sticks here and there within the framework - but it's standing! All in all, a good way to pass a holiday afternoon.
5 comments:
Happy New Year! This reminds me of the Eiffel Tower. Very impressive!
This is brilliant, and very impressive. My children would have eaten most of them and would therefore maybe have managed the first level....maybe. It is an impressive feat that your children built and did not eat!
Thank you for your kind words on my Christmas post. I hope you and your family have a truly wonderful 2016!
That is one very cool pretzel structure. :-) I like the idea as we've tried spaghetti and marshmallows before and had difficulty with the spaghetti breaking.
WOW! That takes way more patience with piping than I currently have. I'm seriously impressed with it.
This is amazing! You certainly know how to undertake large scale projects :)
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