Doughnut Shop Pretend Play With Homemade Playdough

Let’s be bakers with this doughnut shop pretend play prompt!

This month the theme for the Poppins Book Nook (a virtual book club for kids) was “In The Kitchen” so we set out to find cooking related books and activities. My girls love to help in the kitchen but none of the kids cookbooks at our library caught their eye so we decided to find fun books featuring chefs and bakers then created this fun activity with homemade playdough.

Doughnut Shop Pretend Play with Homemade Playdough

Post contains affiliate links for your convenience, please see disclosure for more info.

For our book club book we decided on The Donut Chef by Bob Staake.  It’s such a fun book to read! It’s a silly rhyming book that flows easily and my daughter loves to read.  The illustrations are bright and unique, it keeps my daughter interested even when we read it over and over!

To extend the our play and reading of this book we turned our play room into this fun doughnut shop pretend play setup! We made our doughnuts with homemade playdough and the kids had so much fun!

Homemade Playdough Ingredients:

• 1 cup Flour
• ¼ cup Salt
• 1 tsp. Cream of Tartar
• ½ Tbsp. Vegetable Oil
• 1 cup water
• Food coloring

How to Make Homemade Playdough:

• In a large pot, combine all dry ingredients and mix well.
• Add in vegetable oil, food coloring, and water, stir. I find it easier to get the color to blend if I add the food coloring to the water prior to combining in bowl.
• Cook over medium heat until the dough pulls away from pot and starts to become dry.
• Remove from heat, let cool, and knead. (If dough feels too sticky, knead in a Tbsp of flour)

When our playdough was cooled and ready to play with we set up our doughnut shop pretend play area!  My daughter started by getting out her play dishes and mixing up the batter so she could make her doughnuts.

Related: Camping Pretend Play with free printables! 

She rolled the playdough out into “snakes” and then attached them together to make her doughnuts. Then of course we had to add some “sprinkles” using random loose parts from around the craft drawer. We use tri beads, star beads*, & jewelry links.   (*We received our star beads from CraftProjectIdeas.com)

This pretend play activity is great not only for social development but all the manipulation of the playdough and small loose parts is excellent fine motor work too.

Related: Photographer Dramatic Play activity for preschoolers! 

Yum yum!  So much fun! My daughter and the daycare kids played with this for nearly 2 hours straight! Amazing! They took turns being the baker or customer, it was so fun to watch.

Check out all the other book-based activities we’ve done based on books as part of this series.

Looking for more crafts and activities? Check out our index for 100+ plus kids activities! Find activities by theme, materials, skills, age and much more!