Glee Gum - Make Your Own Chocolate Kit ($13.95ARV) Review & Giveaway of Winner's Choice! US 5/21

Make Your Own Candy Kits

Would you like to make your own candy from scratch at home? Glee Gum has three awesome Make Your Own Candy Kits so you can! 

 

Make Your Own Chocolate- $13.95

Make Your Own Chewing Gum- $13.95

Make Your Own Gummies- $13.95

Each one of these kits includes natural ingredients, simple instructions and info about the history and origins of familiar treats. Everyone aged 8 and up have a fantastic time with the process of each kit, younger children can also enjoy these kits as well, but with the supervision of their parent. These kits are both educational and Eco-friendly! The kits are designed to captivate your interest, connect you to the global community as well as allow you to create something yummy to eat.

Glee Gum's Make Your Own Kits as well as other Glee Gum products are sold at gift stores nationwide as well as online at GleeGum.com. You can use Glee Gum's Store Locator to find a retailer near you!

Make Your Own Chocolate Kit!

The Glee Gum Make Your Own Chocolate Kit comes with everything you will need. You will find, organic cocoa butter, cocoa powder, confectioner's sugar (powdered sugar), starter crystals, temperature indicator, paper candy liners, instructions and the story of chocolate! The instructions with this kit are simple and make the process of mixing elements of chemistry with world culture and history so much fun! Each Make Your Own Chocolate Kit makes 8 oz of dark chocolate.

Jedilynn and I made our chocolate after she got home from school, which was fine as it doesn't take long to make! Most of the photos below are taken by Jedilynn, who is 7 year old, she really surprised me with some of the things she captured. 

You will need a microwave safe bowl OR a double boiler on the stove. We do not have a double boiler so we made our chocolate in the microwave. The first step is to melt your cocoa butter, it will be a solid when you receive your kit. I broke our "bar" of cocoa butter up into six pieces to help it melt faster, below is our cocoa butter about half melted. The cocoa butter takes approximately three minutes to fully melt.

Next you add the cocoa powder and confectioner's sugar, stir till all lumps are gone. Then you heat again in the microwave for another 40 seconds, however, if your using a double boiler it will take an additional six minutes.

You then apply the temperature indicator about one inch from the bottom of your bowl or pot (if using double boiler. This is the longest process through out the whole chocolate making experience. You have to continuously stir the chocolate to help it cool, your goal is to get the temp down to 94 degrees. 

It clearly states in the instructions that the temperature indicator is NOT broken, but after several minutes of stirring and stirring and the temperature of the chocolate not registering on the indicator I had to pull out my own kitchen thermometer.... It wasn't registering as the chocolate was above 100 degrees and the indicator strip only goes as high as 100 degrees.  

So we continued to stir, Jedilynn and I taking turns. She by the way, did not make any mess, but when I opened up the cocoa powder I kind of got it all over the stove... Ooops! 

 

Exciting!! It's registering the temperature on the temperature indicator strip!!! We're getting somewhere!

The temperature is dropping! 96 degrees is now in the green, remember our goal temperature is 94 degrees. 

OOH!! It's almost green, okay maybe more so aqua blue, but were getting there!

 We did it! My wrists didn't fully give out, as some of you may know I have really bad wrist. Thankfully this chocolate was not too thick/heavy for my wrists to stir. Our goal of 94 degrees is now GREEN!! Jedilynn was so eager to try the chocolate and lick the spatula, she was so excited we were almost done.

We then added the Starter Crystals. Jedilynn's awesome capture of me pouring in the Starter Crystals. 

Once you've stirred in the Starter Crystals very well you are ready to pour your chocolate into the little candy liners! ALMOST DONE!! I some how dropped about half of the liners in the bowl of chocolate, but it's okay, I saved all but two! Oops again on my part! Goodness!

At this point you can experiment by adding fruits, nuts, other little candies, etc. 

We made some of our chocolates into peanut butter cups. I didn't think about it until after we made some with the peanut butter, but if you were to put your peanut butter into the microwave for a few seconds (no more then 5-10 seconds at a time, take out, stir and place back in microwave for about 5-10 more seconds) then it would have been much easier to get the peanut butter into the liner! The peanut butter does really soften once it hits the chocolate, which is at about 94 degrees still. 

After messing around for a bit with the peanut butter... because I didn't think to put it in the microwave for a few seconds.. I guess I just wanted to make our job more difficult. Anyhow, after adding the peanut butter to a few of them the chocolate really started to cool, which also caused the chocolate to start to harden so I just put it back in the microwave for about 5 seconds and it was perfectly smooth. Then we filled the rest of the liners with just chocolate. 

We placed our filled liners in a shallow pie pan. This was much easier to transfer to the refrigerator then it would have been to move each one at a time. I also put them in the pie pan because when the chocolate is warm and melty, it is pretty heavy on the sides of the liner and super hard to move! 

One you'd filled all of your liners or used up all of your chocolate then place your filled liners int he refrigerator for about 15 minutes or until they are firm. As you can tell in the above photo some had already started to harden. 

 While the chocolates were in the fridge cooling and hardening Jedilynn was finally able to like the spatula as she had wanted to almost the entire time we were making the chocolate.

She is my silly girl! 

I got a half a bite of one of the 17 chocolates we made!! Only four or five of them had peanut butter in them, Jedilynn ate 2 or 3, Dan only got 1 and a friend of ours get another after we thought all the peanut butter filled ones were already eaten. These did NOT last long at all, Jada and Dan ate all of them minus the one half of a bite I got and the one our friend had. 

Connect with Glee Gum!

GleeGum.com has Natural Glee Gum as well as the Make Your Own Kits. You can also find Glee Gum on Facebook, Twitter @gleeguy as well as their Newsletter! Stay connect with Glee Gum so you can be one of the first to hear of special offers, sales, etc! 

 

GIVEAWAY!!

Glee Gum would like to offer one of their Make Your Own Kit to one of Mami's 3 Little Monkeys readers! 

Winner's Choice between the three kits, Chocolate, Gummies or Chewing Gum ($13.95ARV/ech). 

This giveaway is open to the Continental US only, entrants must be at least 18 years of age. To enter this giveaway simply enter through the Rafflecopter Form below. All entries will be verified. Giveaway will end on May 21st, winner will be chosen and emailed shortly there after. Winner has 48 hours from time of email being sent to respond, if no response a new winner will be chosen and emailed. 

Good Luck Everyone!! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: Mami's 3 Little Monkeys received a Make Your Own Chocolate Kit from Glee Gum in exchange for our honest review. We were not compensated in any other way for this review and all opinions and experiences are solely our own! Our opinions may differ from those of your own!