Candy Camp Was Delicious

For the past few summers, one of my best friends and her family would meet for a week at the beach. This year, for obvious reasons, we did not get together for a vacation at the beach. I still wanted to get together in some format, some way to see each other and get the kids together daily for a week virtually.

So I came up with... Candy Camp! 

I had hoped my friend would be able to work with me in creating it as an activity we could do together, but she didn't end up having the capacity. Her youngest daughter wanted to participate (the older one is a teen and has pretty much spent her summer shut in her room), but my friend agreed to it as an idea and okayed the week I wanted to have it. 

My kids were excited to do it, and I bought candy molds for chocolate bars and a kit for creating gummy candies. I planned out the themes for each day and the daily schedule, and I created a online packet with slides that walked the kids through morning activities and pages for afternoon independent work. I set up a Google Meet conference call, and we had kickoff meetings each morning and a wrap-up meeting most afternoons. 

The themes for each day were: 

• Monday - Design your candy
• Tuesday - Market research
• Wednesday - Make your candy!
• Thursday - Plan your packaging and advertising
• Friday - Present your candy and describe your commercial

We had so much fun! My kids really liked it, and my daughter even said, while going through the first day's packet, that this was like a real camp! 

And my kids were so creative! They designed very inventive candies, came up with names and logos, drew the packaging and ads, and developed how they wanted to commercials to go. Here are the candies: 

                

• Far left: Pookie's candy was muffin-shaped fudge with caramel inside and M&Ms on top.
• Far right: Pumpkin's candy was a gummy bar with a dollop of jelly inside and covered with a milk chocolate and white chocolate drizzled on top.
• Middle two: My candy (a white chocolate and milk chocolate version) had chocolate on top and bottom and a middle layer of peanut butter combined with marshmallow fluff and Rice Krispies

We learned some things while doing this camp, too. In addition to market research and branding, there were many teachable moments. For example, our candy making went from Wednesday into Thursday because making candy is a difficult process. We had to make three batches of fudge before we got the right consistency to get the caramel inside and set correctly. We had to figure out how to get jelly into the gummy candy, and we had to scrape off the first try at the chocolate shell because it wouldn't set. 

As I said to my kids late on Wednesday, "Making candy isn't easy! If it was, everyone would do it." 

It was also such a great way to see my friend and her daughter every day and feel like we were really doing something with them. Her daughter really enjoyed it, too, and she came up with an adorable, creative candy, name, and ad. I was quite impressed. 

So it was fun, informative, a great creative outlet, a good bonding experience from a distance, and absolutely delicious! If you ever have the chance to design and make your own candy, I highly recommend it. Just don't make too much, or your next camp will need to be figuring out how to let out your waistband!