Rainbow Pudding Cups

We love making this yummy treat around this time of year. Somehow it's become a family tradition on St. Patrick's Day (although don't worry, we still make the traditional Corned Beef and Cabbage and Irish Soda Bread too.) But every year it's Rainbow Pudding Cups that Big Brother asks for!

What's great about this fun treat is it's easy enough for kids to make almost totally on their own! 

Ingredients:

1 Package Instant Vanilla Pudding Mix

2 Cups Cold Milk

Food Coloring: red, blue, yellow, green*

 (We used red & blue to make purple and red & yellow to make orange. But those colors in actual food coloring could be used more easily.) 

Materials:

Large bowl for mixing pudding

6 small bowls for mixing colors 

Wire whisk

Several spoons 

4 to 6 clear containers for serving pudding 

I set up the ingredients so Big Brother could be in charge of making the pudding. We followed the directions on the box. He opened the mix and added it to the bowl with 2 cups milk. He stirred it for several minutes with the whisk. We then let it chill for 5 minutes in the refrigerator. 

While it chilled we added food coloring to each bowl. Each bowl was a different color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. As I mentioned above we mixed red & blue for purple and red & yellow for orange.

After the pudding had chilled we divided the pudding among the six smaller bowls. Because of the shape of our dessert cups, we usually make purple and blue have a little less pudding, but if the glasses are even in shape you would want to evenly divide the pudding among the six bowls.

Once we divided the pudding we mixed the colors into the pudding so we had six colorful bowls. 

Now came the fun part of layering the pudding into the dessert dishes.  

Starting with the purple we put a little purple pudding into the bottom of each dish. We repeated the same step backwards through the rainbow with the other colors, so we ended with red on top. We were careful to put the next layer on top of the previous layer without mixing.

When we're done we added a gold coin to each one and placed them into the refrigerator until we were ready to eat them! (But they could be eaten right away too!) 

A fun and sweet way to enjoy a rainbow! 

This post may also have been shared at some of these terrific link parties.