There are a lot of examples online of colorful foams for kids to play with. It’s a form of sensory play where small kids can get in touch with the special texture of colorful foam, or for bigger kids to play ice cream shop with, for example. Unfortunately, a lot of these foams are made with inedible ingredients like shaving cream and whatnot. This wasn’t an option for me. Therefore I was happy to find out about chickpea foam!
I have a toddler and a baby. I trust my son by now not to eat the foam, but I cannot say the same for my 10-month-old baby. So I needed something safer than shaving cream. I came across a recipe that uses chickpeas, or rather the fluid that canned chickpeas come in. Chickpea juice, so to say. And since I love to make homemade hummus from chickpeas, I thought it was worth giving it a try!
If you are looking for taste-safe homemade sensory play recipes, you may also like these recipes for salt-free playdough, edible fingerprint, or taste-safe sidewalk chalk.
Recipe for making Chickpea Foam
What you need:
- Can of chickpeas
- Liquid food colloring
- Mixer
The process is simple:
Take a big can of chickpeas and drain the fluid into a mixing bowl. The chickpeas you can use to cook something with.
Now take a mixer and mix the chickpea juice. Nothing else needs to be added. You’ll have to be a bit patient here. It takes between 5 and 10 minutes for it to foam nicely.
Separate the foam into different smaller containers, add a couple of drops of liquid food coloring to each container, and stir gently.
The color will be more or less vibrant, depending on the amount of food coloring you add. But since it might color your kids’ hands a little bit, maybe don’t use too much. I used about two drops.
In conclusion, making foam from chickpea juice works really well! So don’t throw away the liquid when cooking something with chickpeas, but make colorful foam for your kids to have some fun with instead.
You can put it in a container and just let your baby explore the colors and the texture, or you could have your toddler scoop it into play ice cream cones (like the ones you use in the sandbox) and make beautiful colorful ice creams to play ice cream parlor with. A bit messy but a lot of fun.
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