Making Edible Paint WITH the kids

I have been meaning to do this for 5 years. In fact, in the last 5 months, I have said "I need to do this" at least once a week.  Finally, today we did it. We created our own paint.

I figured we would try one of the "edible paint" recipes. I call this a recipe, but to be honest, the kids measured.... so it was just a conglomeration of 5 ingredients.  If it didnt work out, we figured we would see what happened. Worst case, we would have fun mixing.

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp of sugar 
• 2 Tbsp of salt
• 1/3 Cup of flour
• 2 Cups of Water
• Food coloring 

However, when doing this with kids we adhered to the following recipe:

• 2 scoops of sugar and an extra helping from younger brother ("EHFYB") 
• 1/2 scoop + 1 overflowing scoop of salt and an EHFYB 
• 1/3 Cup of flour and an EHFYB 
• 2 Cups of Water monitored by mom because we don't have time to clean it off the floor today
• Food coloring 

Step 1:
Have oldest child get materials and put on the table while holding curious baby who does not want to miss a thing.

Step 2:
Take turns with each child to put an ingredient directly in the pot.  Monitor that the correct measuring cup is used, even it sometimes, the measurement is not always followed.  A short review of how to fill a measurement spoon was in order...

Step 3:
Let each of the kids take a turn at mixing...even the baby.  Have them stir for as long as they want but be sure to stop just 1 minute before they get too excited and the mixture starts to fly out of the bowl.

Step 4:
Give each child a distraction, then bring the pot to the stove to boil the mixture until thick like paint.  You will want to stir the pot continuously with a whisk so it cooks consistently or does not start to burn on the bottom.  This should take about 5 minutes.

Step 5:  Let the mixture cool slightly depending on how patient your children are and then poor into containers. We had 8 glass containers, so we poured as much as we wanted into each container until the pot was empty. We ended up with eight 1/2 cups of paint base.

NOTE:  I used glass because I had these great "taco night" containers that I love that have plastic tops that fit on them. (Ideally, you would let the mixture cool until it was just warm and you would pour them into plastic clear cups.)

Step 6:  Closely monitor the addition of food coloring. I highly recommend that this is done for them if at all possible. We added 5 drops to create most of the colors which seemed to work out fine. Some other colors were the result of older brother helping.

Step 7: Let older brother and younger brother try it out. The paint was not as bright as store bought paint and it was not as thick, but they were very excited that they can use as much as they like and just keep layering on the paint without asked to ration the paint for "next time".

Step 8: When the brothers are well occupied, introduced baby to the paint.

I guess we should have bought edible paper too.

This is where the creativity of my kids is so much better than mine. I took away the half eaten paper and let her just draw on the high chair.  Then oldest brother took a blank piece of paper and laid in on top of her "drawing" to transfer the image.  And now we have her first official painting....