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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Homemade Playdoh!

Today's post is a bit off from what I normally post, but at the moment, my youngest daughter is obsessed with Playdoh.  As soon as she finishes her breakfast, she pushes her plate away, and says "Dadoh?" with an expectant look on her face.
So once my bucket of store bought stuff died, I decided that I'd make a batch of homemade stuff up.  For some reason, all my life I've been making it backwards - making the dough up, and then colouring it afterwards.  Never again! This seriously took me 8 minutes, plus 5 minutes in the fridge so that it'd cool down enough for them to play with it.
Here's the recipe I used :
2 cups water
1 cup salt
4 tablespoons cream of tartar
2 tbspn cooking oil
Food colouring, and lots of it
2 cups plain flour.

Normally I'd do the flour, water, salt etc, and then try to knead the colour through the dough after it was cooked, but today I tried putting the food colour in the water.  You need quite a bit, so don't be a miser!
I then added the oil, salt, oil, cream of tartar, and finally the flour, which i beat into the liquid with a wooden spoon.
I then placed it over the stove, and heated it, stirring it continuously until it began to stick together and become more of a dough than a liquid.  This bit only takes between 3-5 minutes.
I turned it out into a dish and put it in the fridge for 5 minutes to cool down so I could knead it.

Meanwhile I'd decided to add a bit of superfine glitter to it, just to win extra brownie points with my girls :)
So when I gave the dough a bit of a knead to make sure it was all well mixed, I threw in a good few spoons of fine glitter, and kneaded that through.  You can't see how glittery it is in the photo, but it's really glittery! I also made sure I had a fairly snug fitting airtight container to store the playdoh in to keep it good.  Some people swear by keeping it in the fridge, but as it gets so hot here, storing it in the fridge makes it sweat when you take it out, which makes it go icky very quickly.
I couldn't believe how quick it was to make today! I'm definitely not going back to the bad old way of taking ages to knead colour in, and invariably ending up with multicoloured hands!
Try it today - your kids will love it!
(and as it's all food ingredients, it doesn't matter if they eat it - though the salt is designed to slow them down a bit!).
x Rita

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