ButterPies.com - Doing the kid thing

Yesterday, I made play dough for my kids using the recipe that my mom used to make for us.  Its so easy and they had a great time playing and squishing it.  It doesn’t stick to furniture, doesn’t stain their hands and I know exactly what it is made of because I made it.  Even more to the point, its made from food ingredients so when my son put it in his mouth, I could just laugh at his funny face instead of worrying.

Here’s what I did, but there are a lot of recipes out there and so if you have some ingredients but not others, just Google until you find one that works with what you have.

Salt Dough

•  1/2 cup of salt
• 1 cup of water
• 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar (makes it last longer!)
• 1/2 cup to 1 1/2 cups of flour
• Food coloring (I used 3 drops of blue and got a lovely light, greenish blue color)

Heat everything up but the flour until its warm then remove from heat and stir in the flour.  Start with 1/2 a cup and keep adding until the dough is no longer sticky.  I stirred it with a spoon for awhile, then just with my hands at the end.  I ended up using a little less than 1 cup of flour and its definitely ’sticky’ until you get the right amount of flour, so you’ll know when its right.  You get about two softballs worth of dough out of this.

My kids sat at the table for a good hour with forks, cookie cutters and chopsticks playing with the dough.   My one year old wasn’t as interested as my two and half year old, but fun was had by all.  We kept the dough in the refrigerator in a plastic bag and used it again that afternoon.  It should last for awhile -that is, my kids will get it dirty and gross long before it will actually go bad.  Then we’ll just make more!