Fancy Play Food Tutorial (the Easy Way)

My daughter recently received a doll house for her birthday.  It is a homemade one and doesn’t have a lot of accessories, so I decided we needed some play food.  There are a lot of really talented people making miniature food with polymer clay, but I don’t have time to hand sculpt fancy concoctions and I definitely don’t want to spend a lot of money buying something that can be easily lost or broken.

Materials:

• Scrap polymer clay
• acrylic paint, like apple barrel or folk art brands
• acrylic sealer, I would use a spray
• baby powder or cornstarch to use as a mold release

• Play-doh sweet creations set (my daughter received this for Christmas, Play-doh has a lot of different sets and there are a variety of different shaped molds so check your sets, ask your friends and keep an eye out at yard sales, these molds work great for polymer clay).   The green and the red ones on the left are some that I found in our collection.

Start by conditioning your clay, it need to be warm and soft to produce a good shape.  You can condition it by hand kneading or you can run it through the pasta machine a few times.

Use a brush to apply baby powder or corn starch to the inside of your molds.  Roll the clay into small balls and then firmly press a ball into the mold.  I use my thumb to really get it in there good.  There will be excess clay around the outside edge of the mold and this is what I use to pull the clay out. 

After removing the clay from the mold the bottoms can be rough.  I used my tissue blade to slice the excess clay off.  The piece can be easily sculpted and reshaped, remember this is just play food don’t make yourself crazy making it “perfect”.  Here they are ready for the oven. Bake according to the package directions, mine were supposed to be baked at 275 for 30 to 40 minutes, but I must have bumped the temperature dial on my toaster oven because they came out looking like this.

I guess it’s good I used scrap clay and was planning to paint them anyway :).

Paint your creations to make them look like real food and then seal with acrylic sealer.I was able to whip these up in an couple of days (during nap time and such) and my daughter was delighted with them.  An older child would be able to help you make/paint the shapes, but it was a bit beyond my three year old abilities.  ***Always supervise small children with this play food as it can be a choking hazard.***