Homemade Candy Buttons Recipe

Retro homemade candy buttons are a fun, easy, colorful treat to make for any party. Bet your kids will love ‘em!

These homemade candy buttons, or candy dots, bring me right back to my childhood... Going straight to the candy store in the mall when I had a dollar in my pocket.

I might snatch these up right along with Now-and-Laters and Nerds. Making your own is not only easy, but they taste even better than store-bought.

The original candy buttons were made by the Cumberland Valley brand, but Necco purchased the company in 1980 and took over production, and now they have the monopoly on these strips of candy-dot-filled paper.

According to NECCO, they still produce three-quarters of a billion candy dots a year. They flavor the buttons with lemon, lime, and cherry.

To make your own candy buttons, you'll need to cut strips of paper for the backing. You may use freezer paper, parchment paper, and even white card stock paper.

For the candy dots, I use my all-time favorite, best-ever recipe for royal icing. The royal icing dries well enough to handle and package without smushing or smearing, but it isn't as hard and brittle as traditional royal icing, as I add a few other ingredients for better texture.

You may also choose to add extracts to the icing for different flavors, such as lime, lemon, or cherry, like the original, or peppermint, orange, or any of your favorites.

Here, I divide the icing into five different colors, but you may choose as many or few colors as you like.

Making candy buttons for party favors or the holidays? Use colors to match your theme. Or, add purple into the mix, and make a true rainbow of colors.

If you need tips on choosing the best food colors, find all you need to know about food coloring here.

To make all of your candy buttons uniform, I've provided a free printable template. To use the template, tape a strip of freezer paper on top of the template and let the dots show through the paper. Alternatively, you may use a food writer to draw little dots on the freezer paper strip, using the template to trace, and then pipe on top of the food writer dots.

Homemade candy buttons are a perfect treat to make for party favors (roll up the paper and package in little cellophane bags with ribbon) or just for fun any day.

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