Colored Scented Rice

It's summer and I've decided that it's time to start getting ready for the upcoming year. One of the things that I use often is rice. I use it for art projects, the sensory table, practicle life, and math activities. I've seen colored rice before and thought that this would add to the experience. As I was exploring the internet, I came across a recipe that called for adding alchohol, but another recipe scented the rice in addition to coloring it.

This intrigued me. It used water and koolaid, but required overnight drying. I didn't have time for that because I needed my table and counter tops and the alcohol dries more quickly. I thought about how I could improve upon this idea of scenting the rice. This is what I came up with:

2 kool-aid packets each of orange, lemon-lime, black cherry, grape and tropical punch
peppermint extract
lemon extract
anise extract (I just wanted to see what it smelled like. It turns out it smells kinda like licorce.)
alchohol
20lbs of rice
food color
wax paper
water
5 oz bathroom cups
gallon size ziploc bags

In each bag, I put 6 cups of rice.

For the food coloring:

2-3 teaspoons of alchohol
A lot of food coloring (the whole bottle for yellow and blue, quadrupled the recipe for brown-I wish I added more than that)
Entire bottle of extracts (peppermint-blue; lemon-yellow; anise-brown)

For the kool-aid

2 packages of kool-aid
2-3 teaspoons of alchohol
2 oz of water
Stir until all of the kool-aid is dissolved

Then I rolled the bags until the rice was evenly coated. I then poured out the rice on about 2 1/2 feet of wax paper to dry. The scents are so concentrated that they over power the alchohol.

It took about 1 hour for the rice to dry but I left it out 3 1/2 hours because I took a nap.

To bag the rice, Phil helped me. We carefully lifted the sides of the wax paper to get it all towards the center. We then fashioned the paper into a tube. He placed one end into the dry ziploc and I lifted the other pouring it all in. This will allow for convienent storage.

The one listed as "cherry" is really "tropical punch". I accidently mislabled it.

I dated the bags because I wanted to see how long the rice the held the scent.

** It's 4 days later and the kool-aid rice is starting to dissipate. But the extract scented rice is still very potent. **