St John the Baptist ~ Locusts and Honey

For the feast of St John the Baptist this year, we wanted to focus on the two staple foods he had lived on ~ locusts and honey.
I had bought last year a Nordic Ware Bee Hive Pan since I have a son born on the feast of St Ambrose (bee hive is one of his symbols) and I would say that this is one pan you can put to good use throughout the liturgical year as many saints were associated with bees..St Rita of Casica another and all the eloquent, "honey-tongued" preachers of the Church.

I used this lovely Carmel Banana cake recipe for the beehive, but any good cake recipe will do, of course a recipe that has honey in it, even more appropriate.

I poured the yellow icing sugar mixture over the top and made sure it ran down both sides to the bottom, so no join can be seen where the two halves are brought together. The bees are in the mold, you only need to colour the bees.

Here are some of our edible locusts, all lined up on our tray!

I bought some crunchy caramel sticks, they have that bit of 'crunch' like a locust would have as well as some 'ooze' (the caramel) they would have as well.

I cut each stick in half and made sure that I shaved a little more off to create an angle as you can see above.

I used one bag of pretzels.

So basically, it is the crunchy caramel stick, pretzels broken like you see above, pecans and a tube of black icing sugar.

My 'glue' to put the locusts together is icing sugar, a little water and yellow and red food dye to create an orange colour that goes well with the colour of the pretzels.

So I 'glued' a pecan on the back, for the locusts back wings folded together.

Then I 'glued' on the locusts legs.

Then 'glued' a peacan on the sloped front of the caramel stick for the head and with the black tube, created the pop eyes of a bug.

Awww, how can anybody eat that cute little critter?

Oh my goodness, a plague of them here!

They weren't an expensive endevour either, I bought the caramel sticks for $4 ~ that gave me up to 48 locusts. One bag of pecans, one bag of prezels, a little icing sugar and that was it!

Happy Feast Day!