Sensory

Orange Zest Salt Dough Recipe

Colleen Beck OTR/L

Colleen Beck, OTR/L is a pediatric occupational therapist and the owner and author of The OT Toolbox website. She manages all of The OT Toolbox social media accounts and runs the popular newsletter. Colleen created The OT Toolbox in 2011 and since then has written thousands of blog posts designed to support therapy providers, educators, parents, counselors, admin, and caregivers in promoting the healthy development of kids. Check out Colleen's blog posts below:

by Colleen Beck OTR/L
November 12, 2014

We love a fun play dough recipe! From glow in the dark dough to crayon dough, we’ve done a lot of dough experiments. This time, we whipped up a salt dough recipe with an added ingredient…orange zest!

This recipe is perfect for ornaments for the holidays, or just a fun sensory experience for playing with. The kids loved zesting their oranges (and then eating the insides) and have actually been asking to zest an orange each day since!

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To make orange zest salt dough, you’ll need a few ingredients:

flour

salt

water

orange

We started with our standard salt dough recipe and added 1/2 cup of orange zest.

The kids seriously zested oranges for close to an hour. Our salt dough had more than a little pulp added in, but that’s ok. We used a box cheese grater and that worked great for the kids. Keep a close eye on children if they are zesting oranges. It’s easy to scrape knuckles, but with supervision, this is a fine activity for children (my five year old and 7 year old did this part…I helped the 3 year old with hand over hand assistance).

Our kitchen smelled amazing.

Mix the zest into the salt dough and knead, knead, knead. This is the important part and if your dough seems to sticky, keep kneading. You can add a bit more flour, too.

Awesome! Once the zest was fully kneaded into the salt dough, the scent was less strong.

We started playing! Flatten out the dough, roll, cut with cookie cutters. I LOVE using my mini mason jars as a cookie cutter or ornament cutter. It’s the perfect size.

We did need a little bit of flour added to the surface of our cutting board while we played with the dough. Dab the salt dough onto the flour and cut with a cookie cutter or mason jar.

We made starts and will use them for fun Christmas ornaments. Kind of like our gingerbread salt dough recipe where we made gingerbread men for a fun garland.

If you make your dough into an ornament, bake on a cookie sheet for 3 hours at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Be sure to poke a hole in the dough before baking. We used a chop stick.

This post is part of the 12 months of sensory dough series.