“Ice Cream” Dough

S is on Summer Holidays from nursery at the moment, and we’re both a bit poorly – so we’ve been doing some activities at home. We’ve made lots of different doughs before using cornflour and different liquids. This time, I used baby lotion.

I have a cupboard upstairs full of baby products; I bought loads when I was pregnant, and was given even more when S was born. But since I don’t even wash her hair, they have mostly stayed in the cupboard. And really, I never worked out what one is supposed to do with baby lotion any way. So I made use of it!

The dough was pretty easy to make. I called it “ice cream” dough because I put it in the ice cream bowls we bought from Poundland the other day. There are probably about a million blog posts out there with other recipes for ice cream dough!

Since there were four bowls, I made it in four colours. The pink didn’t come out very pink… because I ran out of pink colouring, and it turns out even if you only use a little bit of red… it’s still red!

I made the four doughs with slightly different consistencies; some were more fluid than others. Of course, because it’s cornflour, it has that amazing property of shifting between solid and almost-liquid.

I made the dough while S was having a nap, and then placed it on the activity table until she woke up.

She was pretty excited when she woke up and found it out waiting for her! At first she wasn’t sure what to do with it, but we soon had great fun making loads of mess with it.

Because it was so thick, it ran off the spoons like honey and left trails all over the table.

We gathered some of it up into lumps to play with.

It was fun to stretch it out and see what happened.

S had great fun playing with this dough and although bits of it ended up all over the floor, it was fairly easy to clean up. Eventually the baby lotion dissolves into your hands and you’re left with powder that’s easy to wash off your hands too.

It would probably be a bit of an expensive dough to make if you didn’t have baby lotion just hanging about the house waiting to be used up; what I love about cornflour though, is that you can mix just about anything up with it to create a fabulous dough for playing with!