Clean Mud Valentine’s Day Bake Shop

Messy play. I love it. Kids love it. So matching messy play up with the month of February just feels right. With Valentine's Day just around the corner, we created our own little bake shop right in our kitchen. A beautiful, squishy, colourful, messy little bake shop where the kids can mix and mould their pretty mud pies, cakes, and cookies to their heart's content. Before you go getting all worked up about mud pies and messy concoctions spreading themselves through your clean kitchen, let me introduce you to a new kind of mud. Clean mud. That's right. Clean mud. This clean mud phenomenon is sweeping through the kid blogosphere like mad, and there's a reason for that. It's clean, it's pretty, it's simple, and it's awesome. After trying a few different ways of making clean mud, I've found a technique that leaves me entirely out of the equation. My school-age kids can make it all on their own, and it keeps them engaged for hours. It's really that easy. All it takes is a big bin, some water, toilet tissue, and a bar of ivory soap. What you add to it from there, is entirely up to you. If you are making clean mud for smaller children, you may have to help with some of the steps, but they should be able to do most of it themselves. This is our Valentine's version of clean mud sensory play, and here's what you'll need to do the same at home...

1. Start with your 2 rolls of tissue. Have the children rip and tear up both rolls and put them into a big plastic bin of some sort. We added red paper napkins to this clean mud, to give it some more Valentine's love.

2. Once the tissue is torn, the children can grate the entire bar of soap into the bin. If you are doing this with smaller children, you may want to help with this process so they don't scrape their wee fingers.

3. Now for the fun part! Slowly pour water into the bin while the children mix and squish. I poured 2 to 3 cups at a time. The more water you pour in, the sudsier and squishier your clean mud will be. Be careful not to pour too much in or you'll end up with soup and the mud won't be mouldable.

4. Once your clean mud is the perfect consistency, you can colour it with paint if you like. If you want to make it all one colour, just pour a few glugs of paint into your bin and mix with your hands. If you want more than one colour, separate your mud into smaller piles. Make a little dent in each pile and pour in the desired paint colour. Squish and mix.

*I will add that the colour-mixing portion of this recipe is the most fun for the kids. They love it. I let them be free with the paint bottles and they use them like part of their "baking ingredients" in their bake shop. We usually end up with some really pretty colours by the end of the activity.

When your mud is mixed, the children can choose to keep it inside the bin for more mixing and stirring, or it can be brought out of the bin and placed right on the table. The clean mud is just that—clean. It doesn't stain the table, it doesn't stick to the table, and it doesn't pour all over onto the floor. If it is mixed properly, clean mud is as mouldable as play dough, but feels so much more interesting...

When it's time to clean up, you can put your clean mud in a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap, or in an ice cream bucket with a lid and store it for the next day's play session. We have had it last about three days before having to throw it out. If some of it spills on your floor or chairs, it is easily picked up. Even if you miss some and it happens to dry up before you notice it, the bits will flake off very easily.

*I would not recommend this activity for children who still put things in their mouths, as the soap would not be a pleasant snack.