How to Make Your Own Cloud Dough Recipe with Extra Yogurt

I’ve been looking for new diy sensory cloud dough recipe ideas and came across one that uses yogurt. In fact – it ONLY uses yogurt and cornstarch! At first I was really skeptical, and it is most certainly a very messy play recipe, but I’ll share with you what it’s like and why you might decide to use it!

It’s pretty often that I start cleaning out my fridge and find a pile of yogurt that is going bad soon. I discovered this amazingly simple Fresh Fruit Yogurt Bark recipe you have to make, but this Cloud Dough recipe is fun too!

I was working on a project for yogurt at the time and although my kids like them – I bought way too many that we could manage eating before they expired. So I decided to do the next best thing – use them for play!

Essentially you want one yogurt cup mixed with 1 cup of cornstarch. These are the only two ingredients and you may need to slightly adjust the amount depending on what yogurt you use.

Because it IS yogurt and that is a perishable item this Cloud Dough recipe is more of an immediate use recipe. I’m sure you could stick it in the fridge for a night or for a weekend play but I wouldn’t keep it much past that.

When I first started mixing the yogurt and cornstarch together I was extremely skeptical. I even remember saying out loud what a horrible recipe this was. STICK WITH IT! You really have to mix it well and I found that towards the end I actually had to hand mix it with my hands to really get a decent consistency. Just mixing with a fork or spoon won’t do the trick.

Cloud dough (or Moon Dough) has an AMAZING feel to it! It’s so soft and smooth – fantastic for sensory play. What’s not so great is that it is messy and crumbly! You can squeeze a handful together and form nice soft shapes with it, but if you squeeze too much it crumbles apart just like Moon Dough.

It’s kind of one of those things that kids LOVE and parents hate HAHA! My daughter plays with her Moon Dough a LOT. It’s a crazy mess but it keeps her happy for hours so we just roll with it.

Here you can see the “crumble” that happens when you squeeze too hard. We don’t make this cloud dough recipe often BUT we do still use it when we have too much yogurt around. It’s great if you have more yogurt than you can handle eating.

It’s also a cheap and fun way to fill your sandbox for one day play and of course technically edible (though not tasty) if you’re worried about toddlers eating it. (remember it’s still a perishable food so don’t keep it in there long or it will be gross!)

Another thing that cloud dough is GREAT for is creating animal tracks! Because the dough has such a soft smooth consistency the tracks are VERY easy to see and impress into the dough.

I LOVE the Safari Ltd. figurines because they do an awesome job at leaving real track marks in the dough like our eagle above!

Here you can see a variety of different animals and their tracks.

Again this cloud dough is a crazy fun sensory recipe but definitely not your “every day” play recipe. It is best used in a tray as a crumbly soft smooth sensory medium that can be squeezed and somewhat molded.