2014 is the 50th year of the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its enticing, magical world of chocolate waterfalls, everlasting gobstoppers and fizzy-lifting drinks. There are all sorts of events taking place to celebrate the occasion, where kids can snuggle up for a story in Grandpa Joe's bed or invent and package their own chocolate bar. But you can also cause a bit of a Dahlesque, sense-jumbling sensation at home by making lickable wallpaper. What child can resist it?

It's been done before, of course. In 2010, Heston Blumenthal, the Willy Wonka of modern cheffery, created funky, flavoured rolls of wallpaper featuring 1960s starters such as canned tomato soup and prawn cocktail. You can find the recipes in his book Fantastical Feasts, but the "sausage on a stick" formula alone has 19 ingredients and involves dryers, stencils and tea strainers. In 2012, artists and food technicians worked together to inject a little tongue-flicking fun into the lives of London office workers by covering the inside of a lift with wallpaper decorated with deconstructed Jaffa Cakes. But it took them a month.

There's also, as you'd expect, a good recipe for lickable wallpaper using apple in Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes, but it involves boiling and simmering and rolling and delayed gratification – you have to leave it to dry for over eight hours.

This method has no culinary sophistication whatsoever, but it's every bit as appealing as the original and you'll have it up on the wall before you can say snozberry.

But hang on a minute, you might be thinking. Magic aside and all that, isn't lickable wallpaper a bit gross? All that licking and re-licking and sharing of saliva. Isn't it just a recipe for a germ fest? Well, it could be. The key is to make one strip of wallpaper per child for their personal use only. It's not going to be hanging around for that long, anyway. It'll be a one-hit wonder, before they move on to enquiring whether you know how to make three-course-dinner chewing gum or grow toffee-apple trees.

Willy Wonka would be proud. Photograph: Claire Potter

Lickable wallpaper (six strips)

Boiled sweets in five different colours (3 or 4 of each colour)

An artist's paintbrush (with strong bristles)

Some sheets of gloss photo paper (plus printer and computer)

A small saucepan

First you need some traditional boiled, clear, fruit-flavoured sweets. The next step is to Google some images of fruit that match the colours of sweets you've got – it would be crazy not to include a snozberry (yes, it's easy to find images of that). Illustrations of fruit tend to look more "wallpapery" than photos.

Paste the images into a document in vertical lines so that there's one of each type of fruit in each line. Adjust the images if necessary so they are all roughly the same size – around 4 x 4 cm is good. Print them out on to gloss photo paper – which is robust and waterproof enough to take the flavouring without disintegrating. (The child's tongue doesn't tend to come into contact with the actual paper, but I checked with Kodak and they said the coating on these papers – from all manufacturers – is made of gelatin from cows' bones.) If your lines of fruit come out longer than one page, just join the pieces of paper together. Now cut the paper into strips so that there is a line of fruit on each one.

Next, melt the boiled sweets in a pan, one colour at a time – extremely slowly, over a very low heat – until they are a gooey liquid. Catch them at the point when they are fully melted but before they start to brown and use the paintbrush to spread a thin layer of the goo on to the appropriate fruit on the strips of paper: Yellow on the lemons, purple on the blackberries, etc. You need to work quickly because the liquid will start to solidify almost immeditately when it hits the paper. (The process is a bit of a pan-ruiner, but just scrape any excess goo out of the pan between colours and you won't have to wash it till the end.)

A word of warning: Keep the kids away from the hot pan, and be careful yourself. The liquid is hot enough to melt an Oompa-Loompa. This is definitely more of a make for than a make with the kids thing, and, anyway, it's going to be much more mysterious and captivating if, like Willy Wonka, you keep your "most precious sweet-making secrets" to yourself.

Now stick the strips up in a row at lickable height and let the kids at them. It's great for kids' parties or simply as a surprise to perk up an ordinary weekday. "Hey kids! Guess what's for pudding today …"