Homemade Whole Wheat Pasta Kids Can Make

1 / 18 / 141 / 24 / 14

There’s no doubt we have a thing for play doughs in this house. I absolutely love coming up with fun new dough recipes, and Miss G absolutely loves exploring and creating with them. I’m not sure where this crazy idea came from exactly, but one day I found myself wondering why we had yet to play with basic cooking doughs {like the ones used to make breads and pastas}. Miss G’s well out of the putting things in her mouth stage, so ingredients like raw eggs are not a concern, and how fun would it be to ‘play’ with the dough by shaping and cutting, and then cook it up into something delicious? Sounded like a plan to me {as long as very clean hands and a clean playing surface were involved, that is!}

Sweet & Stretchy {EDIBLE} Marshmallow Dough

8 / 1 / 131 / 14 / 14

While Gracen napped this afternoon, I decided to finally put the bag of marshmallows I’ve been carting around for the last couple of weeks to good use. And oh my word, am I ever glad I did!

Ooblek Dough

5 / 15 / 138 / 11 / 13

Have you every come home from a shopping trip with surprise item in your bags? That’s exactly what happened with this hair gel… I do not use hair gel. Brad does not use hair gel. No one in our house uses hair gel. Yet after returning home from a grocery shopping trip with Miss G a few weeks ago, there it was in one of our bags. My immediate thought was, ‘Crap! Did we accidentally steal this?!’ I checked the bill and nope, we’d paid for it. How it got through the checkout and into our bags, I have no idea.

Anyways, knowing that we wouldn’t be using it in our hair anytime soon, I decided we’d use it for some sort of play. And when nothing brilliant had come to mind in a few week’s time, I decided that we’d mix it with cornstarch. Because cornstarch mixed with any sort of liquid = cool, right?

It took some serious mixing to bring the ingredients together first, then it took some serious kneading to smooth it out and soften it up. The result, however, was quite lovely. Pillowy soft and lightweight, this dough behaves a lot like ooblek does. When handled gently and moved slowly, it’s stretchy and elastic, and when handled more abruptly, it breaks off in chunks.

Gracen wanted to play with it immediately, so together we collected some bowls, silicon moulds, and plastic utensils and brought everything outside to play with.

She began exploring her new dough by sinking her hands into it, squishing it between her fingers, and poking holes into it…

Then it was time to fill all of the containers with “oatmeal”.

With a good breakfast in our tummies, it was time for dessert. ☺ The dough rolls into balls really nicely, so Miss G turned our ball collection into cupcakes with cherries on top.

When we were done with our first round of dessert, Gracen shouted, “Cookies next!” and took off into the house running. She returned with a tray of creative table goodies – buttons, pony beads, straw pieces, gems, and sparkly pompoms. I was put in charge of forming the cookies and she was in charge of decorating.

To show that we had eaten the cookies all up, Miss G crumbled them all into a bowl.

The cool part was that as soon as she was done, the crumbles had already started melting together to form one mass.

This was such a fun new dough to explore and play with. One thing we did notice is that after being played with for an hour, it had dried quite a bit. It definitely can be played with again, but this is not the type of dough you’ll want to leave out for very long when not in use.

Oobleck Dough

1 cup hair gel
1/2 cup water
food colouring (optional)
2 cups corn starch

Mix the wet ingredients together. Add in the cornstarch and mix really well. Once the dough comes together in a mass, knead until smooth and soft.

Play!

♥

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{AMAZING} Ice Cream Dough

2 / 1 / 133 / 6 / 14

This afternoon Gracen and I tried out a new sensory material originally created by Jessie of Play Create Explore (if you’re a parent and haven’t checked out her blog before, you definitely should – she’s got hundreds of sensory play ideas, fun bath ideas, and tons more) and it was AWESOME.

The ingredients seem a little strange, but they work perfectly together to create a hard ice cream-looking texture. The main two ingredients are cornstarch and conditioner – yes, hair conditioner – the cheapest variety you can find. The other stuff is just food colouring and cheap imitation extracts to make it look and smell more like real ice cream.

We decided on making 3 ‘flavours’ (coconut, strawberry, and hazelnut), Gracen started us off by putting an equal amount of conditioner in 3 bowls.

Then she added our food colouring – none for coconut, red for strawberry, and a combination of red, green, and yellow for the hazelnut.

Then she added a generous pour of extract into each of the bowls…

And mixed them up.

One thing I will say is that we should have spend a little more time looking for an unscented {or at least a very lightly scented} conditioner. At $1.28, the price was certainly right, but the strong ‘fresh’ scent gave our imitation extracts a serious run for their money. Even something food scented would have been better… Next time we’ll look for something of the strawberry / coconut / mango variety.

Next up was the messy part… Mixing the cornstarch into the conditioner mixture.

After gently folding and blending the cornstarch and conditioner together, this was the end result.

Isn’t it crazy how much it looks like REAL hard ice cream?!

Here’s a close up view.

And as long as it’s handled like hard ice cream usually is (not rolled or smoothed over too much – thanks for the tip, Jessie!), it scoops perfectly – just as ice cream does. ☺

We followed Play Create Explore‘s ratios exactly, so please visit the original post here. The amounts we used for these batches, along with details on the colouring and extracts are as follows:

Coconut Ice Cream Dough