Edible Finger Paint

by Julia Parker, from the October 2006 Newsletter

Oh! What fun to make an icky-sticky mess, lick your fingers and have something to show Mom too! This month we made a semi-edible art project. With two six-year old girls, I made an edible paint that they used to make finger-painted masterpieces. Now, the Earth Mother generally shies away from food coloring and sugar but this month’s focus is more on the art of the project than on the nutrition involved. After all, edible paint even if it does have sugar and food coloring seems much better than whatever is put in kids’ non-toxic paint – actually the tempera paint we use contains mostly clay and pigments but I still wouldn’t let my kids eat it.

To make paint, I adapted a recipe from our handy-dandy 1950 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook. This is a book with seven pages of recipes for puddings, tapiocas and custards. Who knew people could eat such a variety of mushy desserts? Anyway, I adapted the recipe for “Plain Cornstarch Pudding” or “Blanc Mange” to make paint. Mmmmm. 

This recipe calls for:

¼ cup sugar
3 tbsp cornstarch
¼ tsp salt
2 cups of milk (but I’m cheap so I used 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of water)
1 ½ tsp of vanilla (but I used almond extract)

Mix all the ingredients (except the vanilla) together in a saucepan and boil for 1 minute. Then stir in the vanilla or other extract. I made five colors of paint with this “custard.” After letting it cool for a few minutes I put the custard into recycled yogurt cups and we added the food coloring. The girls, Aurora and Simone, painted on wax paper using their fingers. We also got into the pantry and found a few assorted candy sprinkles and added them to their creations. Aurora and Simone licked off the excess from their fingers and while the paintings dried I sprayed them off with the hose. We did find that this paint also works well as body paint – if you don’t mind being sticky and you watch out for bees. 

The girls rated this high on the fun art project scale and low on the dessert scale. I rate this high on the easy and fun scale. Finally, I do need to say that this is not an art project you want to keep around the house for a long time, because even if little girls aren’t wild about blanc mange, little mice might love it!

Julia Parker lives in Moscow and is going to bring Strawberry Floating Island Custard from page 219 to the next potluck to which she is invited.

Copyright: Copyright on articles and recipes are jointly held by the Moscow Food Co-op and the respective authors, except were otherwise noted.

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