How to make Cloud Dough Recipe (Colorful & Taste Safe) (2024)

Tagged With: cloud dough, sensory dough

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Welcome to month 2 of the wonderful series of 12 posts about sensory dough and our experiments to make them “taste safe”! Today is our Cloud Dough Recipe! Last month we made foam dough which the kids (surprise, surprise) tasted. You will never guess what we used instead of shaving cream!Catch up with all our sensory doughs here.This months sensory dough is called cloud dough and is traditionally made with flour and baby oil. Let’s get started!

Cloud dough is fluffy, dry and does not stick to your hands like the oil it is made of.

How To Make Cloud Dough

We made our cloud dough recepie with vegetable oil to make it edible and ultimately taste safe. Edible does not mean eat it by the spoon full! It means that if your toddler were to take a taste said toddler would be perfectly fine.

To make cloud dough mix in the 1:8 ratio. That is 1 cup of oil to 8 cups of flour.

You will need:

• All purpose flour
• Vegetable oil
• Oil based food coloring or powder food coloring
• a bowl for mixing
• a sensory tub for playing in

For our little play adventure I wanted to make a variety of colors so used 2 cups of flour per color with 1/4 cup vegetable oil. Please use your kitchen measuring cups and don’t guesstimate else your cloud dough recipe will be too wet. Making the cloud dough is also very easy and does not take much time. A great plus!

How to color cloud dough?

For the coloring you have two options. You can use powered coloring and mix it in the flour before adding the oil or you can use oil based food coloring and premix it in the oil before adding it to the flour.

I had oil based food coloring on hand so premixed into the vegetable oil. I used the tip of a teaspoon worth the more you add the deeper and darker the color.

Now, mix your ingredients in a bowl. You will have to get your hands into the mix to pinch the flour to distribute the oils and coloring.

Once mixed, line the colors up in your sensory bin and provide various items to play with. I let the kids use my kitchen measuring set.

Then the tea set got added by my preschooler when he joined in. (Using cloud dough recipe for preschool is also a great idea.)

And my 3-year-old also came along to inspect. He loves sensory things and urm, things that he could potentially use to cause a lovely mess! If you do this activity indoors a large bed sheet is recommended for under the sensory tub to catch those little messes.

Playing With It

Oh, how he loved the feel of this cloud dough recipe stuff! I love how the colors turned out too, although in hindsight I might have not made the green as it turned the entire bin grey washed out purple when everything was mixed together.

I also think I need a bigger sensory tub! When all 3 kids come to play which they very often do it gets a bit crowded. Or perhaps I need a second tub and I can stick my 3-year-old in it. haha. 😉

As usual, the younger two did try to eat the cloud dough. Which is no surprise.

Other items brought to the cloud dough sensory bin included a wooden train set, various cars, some animals, and the teaspoons from the tea set which resulted in my toddler offering me a bite of the cloud dough.

I hope you enjoyed this little how-to make cloud dough recipe post and that your cloud dough adventure is as much fun as ours was!

Pin this post for reference or our other recipefor larger quantities!