Crayon Cakes

I get a newsletter email from Frugal Living every ?... I don't know, now and then. Well the last one had an idea to recycle all your little crayon bits into "new" crayons. I had read about it before, in a 'Tightwad Gazette' book I have. (It was the first one. If you scroll down, you can see what the books look like. This one has no image for some reason...) I was going to call them crayon muffins, but they look more like little cakes. I had been thinking about doing it for years, but today seemed like a good Arts & Crafts kind of day. So we made some... :P We took all the pieces of crayons (no new ones allowed) and I cut them up into small pieces.

Then we put them into the muffin pan, and a soap mold I have. I wasn't sure about putting the soap mold into the oven, but it was fine. (At 170*.)

Here is the five year olds' crayon muffin, all melted....

And the eleven year olds'. His heart did break when his heart broke. :P (Maybe I should not even try, huh...) He put it back in the mold and remelted it... They are still doing that. It took a lot longer than the directions said, for the crayon pieces to melt. We also weren't sure how they were going to come out of the pan. But we turned the pans over (once the crayons had set up some), and put ice cubes on the bottoms of the tin. The heart popped right out. The muffin one had to be pushed a little from the bottom.... The heart:

The one from the muffin pan:

The kids were really excited when they were done. When you color with them, it is like a variegated crayon. Pretty cool. :D

Edited to add: The soap mold did totally melt. I don't know if it would have, doing it just once. But he put it back in the stove and it melted that time... (In case you were wanting to use a soap mold to make some?) :P