Playing at cupcakes

I love it when a simple idea works.

Lately we’ve had a lot of fun making cupcakes, but with ingredients such as salt and food dye they’re definitely not the sort of cakes you’d like to eat. Rather, our little bakers have been busy making pretend ‘cupcakes’ from playdough.

Playdough: what a classic! It really should be a childhood staple: it’s so cheap and easy to make, it lasts for ages, and it lends itself to all sorts of open-ended creative play.

Playing with playdough seems deceptively simple: it’s soft, squishy and tactile, and therefore lots of fun. But developmentally playdough is also very good for children in lots of important ways - it helps to build their little hand muscles, strengthens little fingers, supports hand eye-coordination, extends fine motor skills, and exercises imaginations. If you’ve never made it before, it may be time to try … the recipe is posted below, at the end of this article.

With the simple addition of some props, playdough can head in a huge range of fun and creative directions. It really does spark some wonderful creative play.

Playdough Bakery

To create your very own cupcake bakery the ingredients are wonderfully simple:

• make a batch of playdough, any colour

• offer some paper patty pans

• offer some decorating options - these could be matchsticks from your craft box, or simply twigs and flowers from the garden.

• offer an oven – a simple cardboard box will do, or a cupboard or shelf.

• offer some pretend cash (as simple as chopped up pieces of paper) or an old plastic card

• sprinkle some magic… talk about the oven being hot, the cook being clever, the cakes being delicious, etc etc. Model using good manners in your conversation, pepper your chat with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and use vocab appropriate to shopping.

• watch imaginations spark and the fun unfold!

How to make playdough

There’s lots of different recipes online, but this one is a reliable ‘go to’.

·        2 cups of plain flour

·        3 tablespoons Cream of Tartar

·        1 cup of salt

·        2 cups of water

·        2 tablespoons cooking oil

·        a few drops of food colouring 

Mix together all the ingredients in a non-stick saucepan and cook over a medium heat. Keep stirring as it heats, thickens and eventually congeals to form one springy mass. Remove it from the saucepan and, when cool enough, knead the mixture until the right texture is achieved.   

You may like to add colours during the cooking, or after. To add later roll lumps into balls, poke a hole with your thumb and add a few drops of food colouring. Knead to spread through the ball.