Kids Cooking Thursday: Cornflour Clay

This week's post isn't really so much of a cooking with kids, as it is a cooking for kids, unless you have children somewhat older than mine. But, if you start as late in the day as I did, you'll get two days worth of activities from this - one day shaping and baking, and another day's worth of painting :)

Cornflour Clay
1 cup cornflour
500g bicarb soda
1 1/2 cups water.

Place all the ingredients in a saucepan over low heat. Stir constantly until the mixture thickens and comes away from the sides of the pan to form a ball. (It'll look like mashed potatoes) Remove from the heat.

Place the mixture onto a work surface dusted with cornflour and let cool.

Once it's cool, you and your children can roll, knead, mould and pretty much do anything they'd do with playdough. Place their finished creations on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and bake for 30 minutes at 180°C. Turn off the heat and leave the tray in the oven for another 40 minutes. Then remove from the oven and cool on a rack. Once cooled you can paint and decorate as desired.

See Miss Four's Play Doh Factory Monkey?

Master Two kept insisting it was 'snow man'

Miss Four did a free form leaf

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Crafty Tuesday

Small boquet

Every Tuesday I try to do something crafty with the kids, even if it's just some drawing. Today we made some decorations for Miss Two's upcoming Pink and Blue themed birthday party. These are really easy to make, but look very effective.

Close up

Cut tissue paper into squares, and stack 8 - 10 on top of each other. Accordion fold all together, then secure with a pipe cleaner. You can just wrap one end of the cleaner around the centre of your paper, or you can do as we did, and fold the cleaner in half, twisting the two halves together under the paper. Then just gently seperate each layer of paper. There's no need to scrunch the paper, the scrunchiness forms automatically as part of the process.