Homemade playdough

The weather here has been awful since the new year and after all the excitement of Christmas and New Year I've had my work cut out keeping LMC entertained. A bit of pre-planning meant that today I was able to do something with her that in my opinion falls into the "fantastic mummy" category – home made playdough! 

I found several recipes online, but a nanny friend told me to look for the ones that involved heating the ingredients as these were the ones that she had found most successful. With that piece of information I decided to try this recipe from the fantastic Instructables site.

The basic recipe is simple enough; 2 cups of plain flour, one cup of salt, just over 200ml of warm water, 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil and one tablespoon of cream of tartar. All the ingredients go in a pan and are heated gently whilst you mix them. I found that they came together quite easily, but then seemed to turn quite quickly into being too dry. I added a bit more water, mixed it on a low heat until the water was all mixed in, then took it off the heat.

Using a plastic board I then kneaded the dough to make sure it was soft and of an even consistency. Once you've got the dough to this stage you can start about adding colour.

I just used the food colouring colours that I had in the cupboard: yellow, pink, red and blue. The instructions tell you to make a well in the balls of dough and then try to knead in the colour without getting the neat colouring on your hands. Impossible! I now have dark blue splodges on my hands, but so be it! 

It takes more colouring than I expected to get a good colouring and when you knead it it takes a little bit for the liquid to be absorbed into the clay and then there is quite a long period when the dough has a "marbled" appearance. Keep going though as you will finally get to the solid colours that you expect.

As making the dough required heating on the hob this wasn't something to do with LMC "helping" but she loved the finished result. As far as I know this is the firsttime she's properly played with playdough and after starting out by giving it some strange looks she soon got into the swing of things.

The benefit of this homemade dough over that bought in shops is that it is somewhat safer if children try to eat it. The high quantity of salt should put them off eating more than the smallest amount, but it doesn't contain any nasty chemicals. You can store the playdough in an air-tight container and it should last a while. If it dries out a few drops of water should refresh it. It will eventually dry out so much that it can't be refreshed any more, but at that stage you can just make some more!