Instant Edible Sukkah: easy tips for the disorganized or spontaneous

top view of child-made edible sukkah with Nitwit candies

Here are a few easy tips about making an edible sukkah from graham crackers and pretzel sticks.  Way easier than my meticulous post with step-by-step instructions and photos from two years ago:  Make a Kosher Edible Sukkah for the obsessively organized.

Construction: Honey Maid graham crackers are ideal.  They break evenly into squares just the right size for building a cube sukkah on a dessert plate. Use the whole rectangle (5″ long) if you are building on a dinner-size paper plate. Yes, they are kosher. Buy a bunch and use them for Sukkot s’mores later. Generic brands crumble when they break, and you will end up with a box full of rejects.

Roof: Snyder’s Pretzel Sticks (kosher) are the perfect length to span a Honey Maid Graham Cracker cube sukkah.  Not rods or dippers, but Sticks.  This year, I could only find them packaged in individual, 100 calorie bags.  If you build a sukkah from the entire graham cracker rectangle, you’ll need to buy pretzel Rods, which are longer. Each brand is a different length, but bags usually have a transparent window through which you can eyeball the measurements. A sukkah made from unbroken Honey Maids will need a rod longer than 5 inches.  Are you getting an idea what I spend my time thinking about?

making edible sukkot, ages 4 to 17

Fruit decor: I like my edible sukkah decor to look realistic. This led to an exhaustive search for to-scale, fruit-shaped gummies and candy as outlined in my earlier post. I did finally find a manufacturer of kosher, fruit-shaped hard candy called Nitwits.  Yes, they look as cute as the nonkosher Runts hanging from the pretzel stick roof of an edible sukkah.  But here is what I realized this year: they are too heavy.  Even big kids have trouble making heavy, slick candy shapes stick to the underside of a pretzel roof.  And, they do not taste great.  I’m not a fan of hard candy, period, but the mixed-age group that made edible sukkot at my kitchen table this year all agreed that the adorable candy tasted yick.

I prefer Trix cereal in the solid colors (not the swirly): it is lightweight, easily to hang from a tiny blob of frosting, sort of looks like tropical fruit, and tastes better than candy to most kids.

Jelly Belly makes kosher fruit-shaped gummies light enough to hang from frosting, but these are more expensive.  Plus, the nutritionally vigilant might not want kids scarfing quite so much sugar.

Schach (the roof covering): I still like parsley because it looks great on top.  The kids take it off, of course, but the frugal among us can rescue it, wash it and use it for tomorrow night’s pasta sauce. Plus, the parsley can be worked into the conversation so that someone will suddenly realize, aloud, that we use parsley for yet another Jewish holiday (Passover / Pesach: karpas).

I already detailed—and I mean detailed—how to plan for and facilitate an edible sukkah event at a synagogue on the actual holiday.  I felt compelled to share those tips because I worked so hard to successfully navigate the various challenges.  The building kept strictly kosher; the event was on a holiday with work restrictions (no snipping corners off of ziploc bags to apply frosting, no writing names onto a child’s paper plate, etc.);  I wanted genuinely attractive results that mimicked real sukkah construction; and I wanted to create kits so that every child had his own materials at hand.  I’d had enough chaos at these events in years past, when eager hands demolished bags of hastily bought groceries.  Panic would ensue among the higher-strung, greed would erupt among the rowdy, and the children who did not feel comfortable diving in and laying claim to unbroken pretzel sticks would get left out completely.  My meticulously prepared kits created order and did not diminish enthusiasm one whit. Enthusiasm was somewhat dampened by the fact that I underestimated the number of kits required, but plenty of boxes and packages were on hand.  I keep them around anyway, so that parents of kids with food allergies can look at ingredients.

All these details are at this earlier post: Make a Kosher Edible Sukkah for the Obsessively Organized.

The search for perfect decor is likewise chronicled there.

The rationale behind building mini sukkot is outlined in my post Build a Tabletop or Model Sukkah.

Rules of sukkah-building from MyJewishLearning.com.