Valentine’s day activities : Making and playing with fake chocolate

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It has been hearts, roses and chocolates galore in the house with so many Valentine’s day activities we have been doing. It has always been fun to do themed activities with my children and they enjoy it so much that they remember many of thee Valentine’s day activities we did last year. “Hey mom, remember that Valentine’s cards we made with those straws, that was fun right?” These kind of moments really would fill any mother’s heart with joy, right? Today we are messing around with some pretend play/sensory play. If you were around last summer, you may have read our ” Faux icecream” pretend play post. Hop on over and read the post!

Building on the same recipe, my 5 year just enjoyed this simple sensory play with a chocolate theme.

Materials

{Direct links to the products are added for your reference}

Our biggest change from our earlier ice cream post to this one is that, the previous post was an invitation to simply engage in sensory activities (which is just as fun) This time I invited my kid to “make, bake and play” with chocolate. She was intrigued and couldn’t wait to get started on this fun Valentine’s day activity.

She made yummy oogey gooey melty chocolate with 3 basic ingredients.

She added about 2 cups of cornstarch in a large bowl and added about 3 TBSP of Cocoa Powder. To get a nice rich brown color she added our favorite art supply – Liquid Watercolors. You can always use brown Food Color { our favorite brand is the Amerigel brand – the colors are very intense} by combining red, yellow and blue food colors by varying the quantities of the primary colors. Finally she kept adding water ( made easier by setting out a container with a spout) until she got the right consistency of melted chocolate.

In this activity I think she enjoyed the process of making the “chocolate” the best. The smell of the “chocolate” alone was delicious. Since she wanted a darker color and so she went ahead and added more watercolor. While doing so she created these stunning swirly patterns on the mixture.

We have a Molded Cookie Pan that we used to fill up with this yummy concoction. If you have one of those Silicone Heart Mold Pan then it will come in handy while you are popping out the “chocolates”.

The filled up cookie pan itself is such a work of art! The process of scooping and pouring the “cookie batter” was great and my kid thought it would be funny to make many swirly designs on the tray to make it more “chocolatey” { tip: remember to spray your cookie pans for easy removal of your chocolates”}

After we filled up at least one more ice tray with the concoction, we placed them in the freezer. Once the cornstarch hardens remove the sheet from the freezer and get ready to pop out your chocolates. This was the batch we made earlier.

Would you look at them? They smelled great, just like chocolate and just looked like chocolates. After about 5 minutes they start melting which I thought was very realistic.

Then it was sensory play galore. She enjoyed holding the “melting hearts” squishing them and watching them ooze through her fingers all the while taking big whiffs of the chocolate scent.