Busy Hands: 'Sandy' Cloud Dough

I think cloud dough is a really interesting medium to play with. It's crumbly, but can also hold together to form shapes. The most basic recipe for cloud dough is to mix flour with baby oil or vegetable oil. You can add colour, but the powdered variety works best with cloud dough. The good thing about cloud dough is that it's safe for babies and toddlers to play with, and it's fun!

Recently, Little Dude wanted to play with his new set of farm animals, so I made some cloud dough to go with it. I got a little creative with my ingredients (in other words, what I could lay my hands on in the kitchen) and I loved the resulting texture! It was grainy, and sand-like, so this recipe could also work as fake sand for sensory play.


Here's what you need to make 'Sandy' Cloud Dough:
- 2 cups flour
- 1/2 cup semolina
- 1/2 cup desiccated coconut
- Food colouring or powdered colour
- 1/2 cup vegetable or baby oil


Combine the dry ingredients, and then add some food colouring. I used the regular liquid colouring, so the result was a speckled green, which looked nice too. You can substitute this with powdered colour for a more even colour. Add the oil in slowly while mixing it well until the dough can hold it's shape.

Little Dude loved the grainy texture of this cloud dough because he loves playing with sand, so it's a good alternative if you aren't sure about letting your baby play with sand, or you don't have it around.

The farm animals had a good time too, and Little Dude put an end to the cloud dough by 'washing' them up, but that was fun too as we had a lovely green, gooey liquid (don't have a picture of that, though)!

(Busy Hands is a series about activities and craft you can do with toddlers and young children).

I'm linking this post with 12 Months of Sensory Dough at Powerful Mothering, 

where you can find loads of variations on cloud dough. 

It's also been linked to:
Let Kids Be Kids // Tuesday Pintorials