Chocolate shop play dough for Valentine’s day.

Today, the hooligans and I set up a play dough chocolate shop in anticipation of Valentine’s Day!  

We started by making our strawberry dough.  I would normally use red kool-aid for the scent and colour here, but alas, I had no kool-aid so I had to get creative.  I used strawberry hair conditioner instead!

Strawberry play dough:

• 1/2  cup strawberry scented hair conditioner
• 1 cup flour
• 2 tsp oil
• pink, red or burgundy food colouring.  (I used Wilton’s icing gel in Burgundy)

Simply mix all your ingredients together with a spoon, and then knead by hand until the colour is blended in, and the dough is smooth.

You can see in the following photo that the dough starts out looking very course, but ends up being quite smooth.

I was guessing at amounts when I mixed up this dough, and I actually used more oil than what I’ve suggested above.  I found the dough to be too sticky, and simply added a bit of flour to correct it.  Start with the 2 tsp that I’ve recommended.  You can always add a bit more oil or a bit of flour to get the dough to the consistency you like.

This dough is amazing!  It has a soft rubbery quality, and it’s almost stretchy.  And the conditioner makes your hands feel great!  If you’re looking for more innovative dough recipes that call for very few ingredients, you should check out  Creative Playhouse’s “One Minute Playdough” and Play Create Explore’s “Ice Cream Dough”.

Chocolate play dough:

For our the chocolate dough, we paid a visit to Anna at the Imagination tree.  Anna is the queen of play dough, and has oodles of great recipes on her site.  We used her “Easy Chocolate Play Dough Recipe” today.  It’s quick and easy, and it looks and smells just like brownie batter when you’re mixing it up.  

 Once we’d mixed up our doughs, I set up a little “chocolate shop” for the hooligans to explore with their play dough.

I’d saved all of our plastic Chocolate containers from Christmas, and they were perfect for this activity.

Glass beads were perfect for decorating our chocolates, and spoons, tweezers or tongs help to develop fine motor skills.

Seashells were fun to press into the dough.  They were also used as moulds, and to make imprints.
And of course, our meatball scoops!  I always set these out with our sensory bins and playdough activities.  These are always the most popular tool on the table.

They’re excellent for developing scissor skills, and they really give fine motor and co-ordination skills a work out.  They’re also fabulous for scooping and sorting, and because of their design, they were just perfect for forming beautiful chocolates today.

I have two sets of these tongs, which I picked up at a thrift shop, but you can order them through amazon.com right here from my site.

The hooligans played with their chocolate shop for about an hour, making bonbons, cupcakes, puddings and treats.

And our house smelled absolutely delicious!

To keep the mess factor under control, I place a vinyl table cloth on the floor.  I picked up a couple of inexpensive ones a couple of years ago, and we use them whenever we’re doing any messy craft or activity.  When we’re finished, I gather up the cloth and give it a shake outside.  Clean up is a snap.

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