How to Make Toddler-Safe Cloud Dough for Sensory Play

I mentioned in some earlier posts that toddlers like sensory play. Here's one of the few activities I found online that my son and I tried together: Cloud Dough. I think it's supposed to be faux-sand or something, when you can't get a sandbox for your kid or feel that soil would be too dirty of an alternative. Here's what ours look like:

Here are the ingredient that you will need to make cloud dough:

• 8 cups of Flour
• 1 cup of Vegetable Oil
• Non-Toxic Tempera Powder (alternative: food color powder)
• A potato masher or your muscular hands

You'll notice that the recipe is "toddler-safe". You see, cloud dough can be made using baby oil, and since most kids who enjoy this are actually below three years of age, the better alternative is vegetable oil or any edible oil. Having said that, here's how you make cloud dough, with the help of pictures and not very helpful instructions:

STEP 1 : Please combine the flour and vegetable oil in a bowl or whatever container you'll be storing your cloud dough in. 

       

 

STEP  2 : Add the tempera powder or powdered food color. In our case, due to laziness and lack of money, we had to settle with liquid food color. Your cloud dough won't look so vibrant with just food color. Believe me, I almost emptied the tiny food color bottles and all I end up with is freckled cloud dough. It still looks nice though, kinda pretty actually; minimalistic and fluffy-looking.

Step 3 : Mash, mash, mash and Stir, stir, stir until your flour becomes as crumbly as Polvoron and evenly colored.

See what I meant when you use liquid food color instead of powder. The food color simply won't mix since there's oil in the recipe. The oil in the flour will just resist the liquid food color's advantages. I tried finding a solution for it by adding vinegar, like what we did for the Rainbow Colored Rice, but it still didn't work out well.Here's what another batch, using mostly liquid blue food color, looked like:

Since this post is rebellious, again, to the original toddler-safe cloud dough recipe I found, here's a direct link to it. You'll see what I mean by how vibrant the cloud dough's colors should look like. Going back to our own version of it, here's what Miggy did with his cloud dough. I threw in some tools meant for sand-play but my toddler thought cars are infinitely better to use for any kind of play.

 

Apparently, cars can act like dump trucks to carry colored rice and swim like fishes in the water. I am honestly mesmerized by my two-year old's imaginations when it comes to his cars' adventures.

I hope you try this, because it's really fun. We even made sand castles and it tempted me to make a giant cloud-dough box but... you know, I'm not that filthy rich and it's flour we're talking about. Think of how many pancakes we can make out of a kilogram alone, we'd never go hungry!