Fanciful Friday: Candy Thank Yous

Back at the beginning of the summer I was babysitting for a family I have known for years.  I not only babysit for this family, but I have done Christmas wrapping for them, run errands, worked on the wife’s business, and done a variety of other tasks that fit into the “jack of all trades” category. 

I was asked to help out on another project.  The wife does a lot of work for the school district, specifically a lot of fundraising.  Her team raised a couple MILLION dollars for the school district and she wanted to thank them for their hard work.  She came up with this idea to have cocktail glasses filled with candy as a thank you gift.  She suggested using jelly beans and creating a margarita, pink champagne, and daiquiri using various colors.  It was my job to execute this idea.

First I went to Diddum and bought the glasses – plastic margarita glasses as small as I could find.  Then I had to find the jelly beans.  I went to a couple place and could not find the right colors.  Finally I went to Powell Street Candy where I found all the jelly beans I wanted in all the right colors.  I bought a couple pounds of cotton candy (pink), cherry (red), lime (green), and coconut (white).  I filled a third of the cups with green, a third of the cups with red and a third of the cups with pink.  On the green sups I added white to the top to make them look like margaritas.  The red cups got a sprinkling of pink to make them look like daiquiris.  The pink cups got a few white beans to represent the bubbles in the pink champagne. 

After filling the cups, I carefully wrapped each one with saran wrap over the top to prevent the beans from falling out.  I then tied a matching ribbon around the base of the glass to keep the saran wrap in place.

Now that the cups were done, there was something missing.  Every good drink needs a good swizzle stick.  While I was at the candy store I had seen these sticks of liquid candy (like honey sticks that you can get at the fair).  I bought several in green apple (green), cherry (red) and honey (a champagne color).  I cut a tiny slit in the top of the saran wrap and inserted the candy straws into the cups.

After assembly was done we added stickers to the bottom that said thank you and the presents were good to go.  From what I heard they were quite a hit!

 Creating something from someone else's idea takes gumption!