Mary Gallagher-Stout: Hi! My name is Mary Gallagher-Stout and today we are making a traditional piata and right now, I am going to show you how to make the paste.

We need water and flour and it's a 2:1 ratio. We get a cup of flour to two cups of water and that is the entire recipe. Now there are a lot of other recipes available to make your paste out of. There is a cooked method but I am using this method because it's not a super strong paste because when you are building a piata, you want to actually have it break, so you don't want to build something with an epoxy like paste. You want something that is going to, you know, fall apart eventually and you want it to be, I guess it's like a consistency of how pudding feels before it's cooked. That it's a very thin, very non toxic way to make glue and if you don't like the smell a big lot, actually I have seen people put like a little bit of vanilla or cinnamon in there and it smells really nice.

So some people have this aversion to the smell of watery flour and it grosses them out, that's just little tip. And if you want to keep it from getting any kind of mould or fungus, you might want to put in a dash of salt and that will keep it from getting mouldy, just little hints, tricks of the trade. Another recipe that you could use is just using regular old Elmer's glue and cutting it with water and making it a little thinner, so it's not as sticky and that also works perfectly when you are building your piata.

Coming up next, I am going to show you how to prepare the mold that we are going to use to build our piata out of.