Edible Glossy Paint

This little art project was a lot of fun. Erik loves to paint, and is always super excited when we do so. I've had this activity pinned for a long time now, but the other day we finally decided to go for it. I dug around in my pantry and found a can of sweetened condensed milk (which happened to have expired and so it really wasn't at all wasteful to put it to good use here) and my box of food coloring. It only took a few seconds to divide the milk into a muffin tin, stir in some food coloring, and turn Erik loose. He started out using a paintbrush and it was fun to watch him swirl the colors together. The paint is really vibrant and shiny, so it's really very visually appealing, if somewhat sticky.

 Yeah, ummm sorry about the bad pictures, I couldn't find my camera and had to use my phone. Oh well, you can get the gist of what's going on.

 It wasn't too horribly long before Erik was literally up to his elbows in paint. He loves finger painting, and it's a challenge to get him to use any kind of brush for very long. I'm okay with that though, this is more about him enjoying some freedom and creativity than it is about staying clean or doing things a certain way.

We really liked the way this paint looked, but I didn't like the way it dried. It was still a bit sticky even after it had dried for a few days (and where Erik had really heaped the paint on it still wasn't dry after two or three days), so I was hesitant to keep the final art pieces around. We hung them up on the fridge for a day or two, but then they "disappeared", never to be seen again.
Would we do this again? Probably. It was cheap (especially since I would probably have just thrown away the expired milk anyways), very visually appealing, and required little prep work. Maybe next time I'll try to help Erik keep from laying the paint on too thick though so that maybe we can keep one or two of the finished pieces.