Tootsie Roll Rose

This is what you get when you have a few extra Tootsie Rolls hanging around and you're looking for an excuse to avoid doing the laundry. Not perfect, but not bad - whatcha think?

They're actually kind of fun and relatively easy to make using fresh (soft) tootsie rolls (or other chewy candy, like Starburst).  Start by rolling a small ball, then smoosh it into a petal shape (the candy will soften from the heat of your hands). Roll the first petal tightly to form the center of the rose.

Keep making petals and apply them, one-by-one in concentric circles, until your flower is done (pinch off any extra from the bottom). All together I used 2-3 small candies per rose.

Now tell your little one to close her eyes and prepare to delight in the huge smile she give you when she sees what you've made.

Oh, and don't be upset when she gobbles it up.

And The Winner Is.............

Wow, I can't believe all the buzz my little giveaway generated - this was so much fun!

I know you're all dying to find out who won, but first I want to explain the process I used to pick a winner. I was originally going to throw names in a bucket and blindly pick a winner, but when I saw how many bloggers were entering the giveaway, I needed to find a more efficient method.

Plan B - use Random.org, but oops, I offered to let bloggers have multiple chances if they tweeted and blogged about the giveaway, so I had to figure out a way to give them the extra chances and still be able to use Random.org to pick a winner. So I ended up assigning additional numbers to the bloggers who earned multiple chances. For example if I had total of 10 bloggers enter and 4 of them earned 2 chances, I'd have to increased the total number of chances to 14. I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, there were 109 bloggers, but a total of 121 chances to win, so I entered 1-121 into Random.org's automatic random number generator and it chose number 36.

So, without further adieu - the winner is:

Judy from The Fajdich Times Congratulations Judy!!!

Wow, this was really a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who entered, and thank you all for your lovely comments - you guys are so wonderful.