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Sunday, July 29, 2012

Treasure Rocks

I made coffee can stilts for L's best friends 4th birthday and not wanting to waste the coffee, I decided to use it to make
treasure rocks to add to the gift.


Treasure rocks are made with coffee dough. Trinkets and toys can be molded inside and then the dough is baked to harden. They look and feel like rocks, but break open fairly easily to reveal their prize inside. I tripled the recipe below to make about 20 rocks. Some for the gift and some for L.

Ingredients
1 cup fresh coffee grounds
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1/4 cup clean play sand
3/4 cup water
toys or trinkets to put inside


How To

Mix all dry ingredients together

  
Add the water until dough is very moldable. Too wet and you won't be able to work with it, too dry and it will crumble. Depending on your results, you can add a bit more flour or water to perfect it.






Mold your small toys/trinkets within the dough. You can leave them outside to dry for a few days OR you can bake them on your oven's lowest setting for a few hours. I baked mine for about 4 hours on 170. Turn them over halfway through.




They really look like rocks!





and of course the fun part is excavating and breaking
 them open to find the treasure!




































For the birthday boy, I packaged the Treasure Rocks in a brown paper bag. I knew I couldn't just hand them a bag of rocks that smelled like coffee, so I thought up a little rhyme to explain them, then printed and stapled this to the bag.



The birthday boy's completed gift




We also made these a few years ago!


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25 comments:

  1. Love this idea and the stilts too...what a wonderful homemade gift...can't wait for our next birthday to make some gifts!

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  2. I LOVE this!!! How fun! I can not wait to make some for Rosie and Jewel :)

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  3. can you use 'used' coffee that you have dried out? Such a fun idea!

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  4. What a fun idea! I love all of the treasures that you hid inside of them. Can't wait to try them out with my little one! :)

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  5. Awesome! What an incredibly creative idea! May I pin this post?

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  6. Yes! You can use dried used coffee grounds. In fact, if you go to the link above where we made this a few years back, thats how we made it the first time. I'm not a coffee drinker so I actually got used coffee grounds from Starbucks! Maura-Leigh, you may certainly pin this :)

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  7. oooh fun! I'm working on some dino activities for my little guy...this would be perfect!

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  8. Is there anything that you should avoid baking in to your treasure stones? Will pretty much any plastic toy hold up? I was kind of thinking of trying to bake dollar bills into them but not sure if that would be smart.

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    1. Did you ever get a reply to this? I don't see one. I was wondering about toys not holding up.

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  9. INCREDIBLE!!!! I've had this recipe waiting dog-eared in one of my kiddo artsy books for a long long time... now that I've seen it in action I can't wait much longer to give it a try! :):)

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  10. I just came across this looking at your blog. LOVE this idea and what a great fine motor skill for the kiddos. My 4 yr old will love this. Thanks for sharing. Just shared on my FB page and pinned this. (Momma's Fun World)

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  11. Bookmarking this!! kudos to your creativity!

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  12. So glad to make it to your blog! I love this idea especially for our little boy. He likes to destroy things so this would be perfect activity for him. ;)

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  13. Your child can be an artist when he grows up. I think even a gold buyer couldn't differentiate his works from real ones. Try to motivate and educate him about art and I'm sure he'll excel in that field.

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  15. Could a younger kid smash these with her hands or are they hard enough to require tools? She's not great with a tot hammer just yet.

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  16. Lauren, they actually aren't that tough to break open and stomping on them with shoes on is always fun too :)

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  17. What kinds of toys do you put inside? Wasn't sure what was actually safe to use! Thanks. Such a cute idea!

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  18. Do the coffee grounds have to be used?

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  19. Very cool idea!! I'll be using this in a round-up post this week. I can't wait to make my own :-)

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