The flour came in a bowl, loose.
A child pressed a finger down into it. An adult spread some of it flat with a finger, and after watching that they started sweeping it around themselves — a line drawn with a fingertip, then dots.
Whatever they did stayed there in the flour.
One child would not put a hand in it at all, so an adult put theirs in first and they went in together.
The dough had cocoa in it.
“What can you smell?”
“Chocolate.”
“It smells sweet.”
“It's squishy.”
Then cutters came out, and they pressed them in.
“Make me a heart.”
They went through the cutters together until the heart one turned up.
Later, outside, they smelled the flowers and the leaves and compared them with the dough.
The flour paste went into a zip bag, closed, so it could be pushed around without getting onto anything.
“Wow.”
“It's cold.”
They moved it about under the plastic with a fingertip, and named what turned up.
“It's a flower.”
“There it is.”
An adult shaped some dough into a loaf.
“I had that with my mum.”
Asked to help, they started tearing off small pieces and putting them on top of the big loaf, decorating it. Another child came over and did the same.
Then one of them set a loaf down on a block.
“The bread's ready.”
And they ate it.
The dough had been rolled into long rice-cake sticks and left in a basket.
“What are these?”
An adult told them, and they picked one up and felt how long it was.
Then a picture came out of the soup people eat at New Year, with the sliced rice cake floating in it.
After that they were cutting — safety knife, one slice at a time, all the way down the stick — and the slices went into a bowl and got eaten.
They pressed animal cutters into the coloured dough — a rabbit, a lion — and then carried the shapes over to the toy pig and the elephant and fed them as medicine.
“Take your medicine.”
An adult got some too.
Then a child rolled a piece into a ball, held it against their own bottom, and announced what it was.
“This is a poo.”
“It looks like it came right out, doesn't it.”
After that everybody was making them, and putting them behind the animals, and behind themselves.
A roller came out with the dough, and the dough went flat under it.
The flat dough became a pizza, and they cut it into triangles.
After that they kept cutting — triangles, then squares, then whatever the knife happened to make — and pressed down on each piece to feel it give.
By the end of the week all three were out at once: the loose powder, the dough, and the paste.
They had got used to it enough to choose, and some went for one and stayed with it.
The paste held them longest. A finger drawn through it leaves a line, and the line stays, and then they draw it again.