My crafting time is severely squished since I returned to work full time. However I still love to craft with my kids and it’s always worth the wait when we do get to craft. With Valentine’s Day coming up we wanted to make our own Pop Its heart shaped chocolate. We tried using pop its to make chocolate bars before and it was really easy so we knew it would make a fun activity at this time of year.

Make your own Pop Its heart shaped chocolate

You don’t need many ingredients and the Pop Its chocolate bars are quick and easy to make. All you need is a silicone Pop Its toy, a bag of M&M or Smarties, and a bar of chocolate.

First thoroughly wash your silicone Pop Its toy in warm, soapy water. Carefully dry your Pop Its toy.

Place a selection of colourful Smarties in each bubble. Our bag of Smarties didn’t contain enough to only use the colour red, so we mixed it by adding a colour on each row.

Break the chocolate bar into small pieces and melt your chocolate in a bain-marie.

This didn’t take long and we were able to remove the glass jug from the saucepan and wipe away any excess water from the bottom of the jug before carefully pouring it into the mold. My daughter used a knife to ensure any small gaps were filled.

Then we placed it in the fridge to harden.  We had enough melted chocolate to fill a couple of molds.

After a couple of hours we removed the Pop Its from the fridge and the kids carefully popped out the chocolate. It came out in rows and they were able to rebuild their chocolate bar into a heart shape before eating it!

This make a fun STEM cooking activity for kids with so many talking points. My 10 year old loves an experiment and this was a great way to talk about melting chocolate and turning the solid bar into liquid chocolate. She is old enough that she was able to help melt the chocolate with supervision but you could do this part for younger children. Let me know if you try it!

You may be interested in our other STEM food activities:

Sink or float eggs

Dissolving Love Hearts (Valentine science)

Skittles vs Smarties experiment

Dissolving Candy Cane experiment