DIY: "Painted" rainbow challah
Make your Shabbat extra colorful by “painting” challah with edible paint
Today feels pretty special. It’s the first Shabbat of a New Jewish Year and to celebrate, we’re baking mini round challahs - one for everyone in our family, and some extra to share.
It’s traditional to have round challah for Rosh Hashanah. The shape reminds us that the seasons of the year go round and round. Our challahs are already pretty adorable, and we were having so much fun baking, that we decided to extend our activity by making edible paint with natural food colors.
If you have any little artists in your life, you might guess what we did next! We used our mini challahs as blank canvases to create rainbow challahs! The edible paint is vibrant and colorful, and painting our challah feels like an extra special way to celebrate the first Shabbat of the New Year!
Making edible paint is so easy too. You only need natural food coloring and a little milk. It’s fun to experiment mixing the colors with your littles too, and if you’re short on time, use store bought challah rolls. Also, if you’re looking for a fun collaborative family project, it would be lovely for everyone to paint one large challah! So let’s go make our Shabbat a little more colorful by painting rainbow challah!
Edible Paint for Rainbow Challah
Here’s what you’ll need to make edible paint for your challah:
Natural Food Coloring (we used McCormick Nature’s Inspiration)
Milk or Half and Half
Additional:
Challah
Sprinkles
Small bowels
Paintbrushes
Here’s how to make edible paint:
1. In a small mixing bowl, sprinkle the food coloring. You only need a small amount for a lovely vibrant color.
2. Pour in a tablespoon of milk.
3. Stir until blended, and repeat with other colors.
4. Set your paint out in little bowls or a paint pallet along with your challah.
We found it best to use a paint brush for each color.
And that’s it! Paint away.
It was extra colorful to top our rainbow challah with sprinkles.
Colors make our world more beautiful, and “painting” challah for Shabbat is the Jewish value Hiddur Mitzvah (beautifying a mitzvah).
Do you have any special plans for the first Shabbat of the Jewish New Year? Share with us in the comments below.
For more Shabbat fun, you can make :
Traditional mini challah with littles
Handmade unicorn challah and extra easy unicorn challah with store bought challah
Celebrate Havdalah with DIY spice bags!
We have a complete Round-up of all our Shabbat activities, and if you want more rainbows in your life, see our rainbow ribbon rings and edible rainbow and marshmallow clouds!
We hope your painted rainbow challahs bring extra color and happiness to your first Shabbat of this new Jewish year.
Shabbat Shalom,
~ Jennifer
Unicorn challah, for more challah fun!
