Playdough sweet and cake shop

 We have had a fantastic time with home made play dough.  I have just had to share this with you as Little Boo loved this and keeps asking to do it again.  I made up three massive batches of play dough Strawberry, Lemon and Chocolate.  The recipes that I used were from the Nurturestore and the Imagination tree blogs. 

Non-cook recipe

• 1 1/2 cups boiling water 
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 cup salt
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons cream of tartar

Add your choice of colours and essence for this activity we added strawberry and lemon.

For Chocolate play dough

• 2 cups boiling water 
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 cup salt
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons cream of tartar
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• drop of glycerine 

Place all the ingredients in a bowl and stir, stir, stir! When it starts to get too difficult to stir place it on the counter and knead.  At this point please be careful as I realised that the play dough is still quite hot (I was too keen)

The chocolate has a brilliant consistency.  I think it is the glycerine so I am going to try and add this to a cooked playdough next time.

I also tried cooked play dough (Strawberry) for the first time and I am loving this! it is so much better in my eyes but this may just be a personal thing.

Cooked play dough 


2 cups of water
2 cups of plain flour
1 cup salt
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1 1/2 tablespoons cream of tartar

Place all the ingredients together in a pan and heat over a low heat.  Keep stirring and do not leave the pan unattended this happens quite quickly.  Before the mixture starts to solidify stir in the colour it is easier to do it at this stage than later on.  After a few minutes the mixture solidifies take it out the pan leave to cool then knead and play!

Here is how it went

We had lots of interesting items out for Little Boo to explore with including our bottle tops.  They make great cakes! 

Making a lollipop

This is a Birthday cake with the candles.

Squashing the playdough into a chocolate tray. 

Little cake with cherry on the top

Up-cycle bottle tops to great playdough cakes. 

After all the cakes and sweets were made Little Boo had to start getting ready for bed. Luckily she asked to play with playdough the next day and asked to repeat the activity that is when we made our cake shop.

Little Boo was shop keeper and Daddy came shopping and wanted a lollipop.

Little Boo was then the customer whilst Mommy was shop keeper.

It was great fun making the sweets and cakes and then even more fun seeing how much Little Boo loved the shop idea.  The shop encouraged a lot of conversation as Little Boo responded to Mommy and Daddies cake orders and used great descriptive words for the different cakes.  Number can also be incorporated as we asked for "two cakes" for example and
talked about how much it would be it was very funny as everything was "seventy pence", I do not even know where she has got the number seventy from? It is amazing how children pick things up.  For older children the activity could be extended as they could put the price tags on the items and actually add the prices themselves then select the correct coins to pay.

The playdough itself was a wonderful sensory experience as they are all had different smells, chocolate is my favourite.  It smells amazing. 

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