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This month’s sensory dough is all about glowing dough! This recipe is for, what else, a taste safe cloud dough that glows!
For the entire year we have been making various sensory doughs from homemade moonsand, cloud dough to slime dough. Our spin on all these recipes is that they are taste safe so that if your little one were to put some in their mouth they would be just fine.
Disclaimer: Please note taste safe is just that “taste safe”, this does not mean eating spoonfuls of the sensory dough. This recipe uses a vitamin to make it glow and any vitamin can be toxic if too much is consumed. Read the ingredients and know your child. Supervised play is always recommended. If your child is likely to eat cloud dough please take a look at our edible playdough recipe here. Also as a note, this post contains affiliate links for your convenience.
Today’s Cloud Dough recipe is brought to you by our friend Laura over at Lalymom….
Hi, it’s me Laura! Thank you for the chance to guest post! It might seem like a strange thing to want to guest post for a recurring series but my friend Nicolette here lives in a place where taste safe glowing ingredients are hard to come by. I said I’d be happy to guest post so she wouldn’t have to skip this month.
Honestly I’m so glad I did it! This was SO fun! And this is coming from a mom who is pretty averse to mess! My kids needed me to have this push to get out of my comfort zone! It led to a lot of experimentation and neat discoveries with my four year old!
After you check out this recipe you should check out the two ways I found to recycle this cloud dough and make it into two more taste-safe glowing play recipes- as well as the other GLOWING awesomeness from the other 12 Months of Sensory Dough Bloggers!
So! Glowing Cloud Dough! To start with I should say that this play recipe is inspired by Nicolette’s super simple taste safe play recipes as well as Asia from Fun at Home with Kids and all her crazy awesome glowing play recipes.
In Asia’s post about Safe and Edible Glowing Water for Bath and Play she uses a specific vitamin to make the water glow. The whole recipe is on her site along with links to the vitamin she used. We actually had a similar vitamin in our medicine cabinet (although twice the strength) so I used that.
This recipe can be prepared ahead of time but I prepared it along with my 4 year old and found it really fun to witness the glowing alchemy-like action together! I kept asking her if she thought it would glow at each step and we would turn the black light on and off for each step.
The part you DON’T see is that we actually experimented with a few other taste safe potentially-glowing ingredients, with varying degrees of success, but none really glowed when combined with so much of our dry ingredients. So when we got THIS reaction below we were both pretty excited! Here is how we did it! If you try it I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
How to Make Glowing, Taste Safe Cloud Dough
Materials:
1-2 of these Vitamins as mentioned
Cooking Oil (Olive, canola, vegetable, etc.)
Water (I don’t count that as an ingredient, you don’t have to buy it!)
A Black light (We got ours here but they are also on Amazon)
Shallow dish or container (ours was a 9X13 Pyrex dish)
Mixing utensils such as a fork or spoon
Play tools such as cups, scoops, and whatever else you like! We used our super fave plastic happy face shot glasses….which sadly no longer show up on the SciPlus website!)
Directions:
Take one or two of your vitamins and crush it to a powder. I used a mortar and pestle but placing it in a zip-top bag and using a rolling pin would also work. It should be a very fine powder. We ended up using two full pills worth because a certain preschooler got ahead of me. I suspect you would be fine with only one but it would be brighter with two.
Pour 1 1/2 cups of corn starch into your dish. Pour the vitamin dust on top. Stir well to combine. When the normal lights are on you should see the powder will look yellow-ish. Feel free to check it out under the black light before the next step. Did you stir it? Okay let’s go!
Keep your black light on for this part. It’s the exciting part. Pour a drizzle (like a tablespoon) of oil in and then about 3 tablespoons of water. (This was the coolest part, to see the glowing water!) You will probably add more later but start with that. Mix it up and watch how the glowing parts spread. COOL! The orange is actually the olive oil!
Keep mixing and mixing, scraping it off the bottom and continually breaking up and clumps you find. We used spoons and forks.
Once it is all incorporated see if it glows fully under the black light and if it clumps when you smush it in your hand. If the answer to either one is no, you need more water. Ours looked like smoldering yellow ashes at one point. If you see dark peaks of cornstarch under the black light, then keep going with the water. Repeat the process adding a couple spoonfuls of water each time. I would say we probably added a total of half cup but I would not want you to overdo it!
Once you get it fully mixed it will have a universal yellow glow and will clump and mold nicely in your hand. It’s time to play! Add in the scoops, cups and other tools!
The texture of this sensory dough is soft and fluffy. It feels slightly damp but does not leave a wet feeling on your hands. It leaves a slight dust on your hands. You can keep a wash cloth or wipes nearby if this would bother you or your kids.
It also looks pretty in the day light and my daughter came back later to play with it in the sink where I stashed it to go run errands. (Mental note, we should just do our messy play in the sink now that she can reach inside! Ha!)
It held up pretty well too, even later in the day after it had dried out a little we could still mold it!
That’s it. That’s the story! Hope you liked it! If so, please do pin it to share!
BONUS: If you like this play recipe, come check out my two companion posts today over at Lalymom! In one I share the Secret Ingredient that takes this Glowing Taste-Safe Cloud Dough Recipe and turns it into Colorful Glowing Taste-Safe Oobleck!
The other one takes this recipe, adds water and another secret ingredient to make Taste-Safe Glowing Bath Paints! Is your head exploding from excitement? I *KNOW*… mine TOO!
Take a look at what my co-hosts got up to with glowing dough this month! Also catch up on all our 12 months of sensory dough right here, as they happen!
Lemon Lime Adventure~Look! We’re Learning!~Glittering Muffins~Still Playing School~ Little Bins for Little Hands~Natural Beach Living~The Eyes of a Boy~Powerful Mothering~ Wildflower Ramblings~I Heart Crafty Things~Delightful Learning~Life of Jennifer Dawn~Sugar Aunts
Follow Nicolette | Powerful Mothering’s board Taste Safe Play on Pinterest.
PATTICE YOUNG says
What’s the big secret about the vitamins? Still don’t see what to GET!
Nicolette Roux says
No secret. just click the link for an explanation of which ones to get
Devany says
Awesome job, Laura! So much fun!