Gingerbread Playdough Recipe & Gingerbread Baby Activities for Kids - Amazing Mess (2024)

This is the 3rd book in our 12 Books of Christmas series:

Many, many years ago, I read Gingerbread Baby to my first class…a little-bitty group of kindergartners in a small private school…and had the best time coming up with activities to do with this fun book by Jan Brett. I think I had several different centers with a variety of ideas, but the one that sticks out the most was when we actually made gingerbread cookies.

And those little Gingerbread Baby cookies jumped right out of the oven and ran away.

We searched the whole school for them and finally found them back in our room. (Maybe even in our gingerbread house? It’s been 13 years, so I can’t quite remember details!) I will never forget the imagination and awe of those kiddos, so when my girls were early elementary and preschool-aged, I did the same thing. You can see our screaming, surprising Gingerbread Man hunt here.

This year when we read Gingerbread Baby, I wasn’t quite up for chasing a cookie escaping from the oven. The girls were on to my sneaky trick anyway. 🙂

So, we made some amazing Gingerbread Playdough instead. I love to make homemade playdough, and when you have the right recipe, it’s just so easy. We borrowed and adapted the Gingerbread playdough recipe from The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle.

(Printable Gingerbread Playdough recipe at the end of the post)

Ingredients:

• 1 C. flour
• 1/2 C. salt
• 2 t. cream of tartar
• 2 t. ground ginger
• 1 T. ground cinnamon
• 1 t. ground cloves
• 1 t. ground nutmeg
• 2 T oil (vegetable works well, but since we don’t use it in our house, we subbed coconut oil)
• 1 cup water

When I’m cooking with the girls, I let them measure, and we prep our ingredients as we go. It makes a few more dishes, but they help with clean-up…so it’s okay! (If I’m just making playdough myself, I add all the dry ingredients into the pot first.)

Whisk all the dry ingredients together. Make sure they are blended well. Next, add the water and oil. Stir until blended.

Turn your burner to low or medium-low heat and continue stirring constantly. You’ll see the dough eventually begin to pull away from the sides and start to ball up. It really doesn’t take too long (a few minutes or so). Once you have a nice consistency, dump out the dough on a non-stick mat or parchment paper. Knead the dough a few times, and there you go–beautiful, easy, amazing-smelling Gingerbread playdough!

Let the fun begin!

After the dough was finished and we read Gingerbread Baby, the girls set to work creating their own Gingerbread Babies.

Which then morphed into

gingerbread families…

gingerbread girls…

gingerbread trees…

and gingerbread stockings.

We used a variety of items we had on hand including beads, wiggly eyes, scrapbooking-type sequins and stars and jewels. I can’t believe how long they played with this. Keep in mind, the girls are 11, 9, and 7 now, so I wasn’t expecting it to be such a hit. They got pretty elaborate with their decorating….and undecorating….and redecorating. I’m talking hours of fun for them!

Here’s the printable version of the Gingerbread Playdough Recipe:

You might also enjoy these Gingerbread Baby crafts & activities:

• Paper Bag Gingerbread House for Preschoolers or Toddlers – Motherhood on a Dime
• Gingerbread Puppet – Motherhood on a Dime
• Interactive Gingerbread House – Jan Brett (author site)
• Gingerbread Baby Board Game – Jan Brett (author site)
• Printable Gingerbread Baby House – Jan Brett (author site)
• Gingerbread Baby Unit Study – Homeschool Share
• Gingerbread Baby Printables – Homeschool Creations
• Gingerbread Man in a Jar Gift Idea – Playdough to Plato
• Gingerbread House from a Milk Carton – PreK Pages
• Gingerbread Busy Bag – Powerful Mothering

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