September 20, 2011

The nerdy rainbow

Playdough's the greatest thing ever, unless you have to actually pay for it or try to get it out of the carpet. But that's part of the risk with playdough, right?

Ever make homemade playdough and have it be dry and crumbly - almost a one time use sort of thing? Me neither. I have no interest in wasting my time that way. But, I'm all for making playdough if I know it'll last. And this recipe will.

Ingredients:
1 C flour
1 C water
1/2 C salt
1 Tbsp oil
1 tsp cream of tartar
food coloring

Combine everything in a saucepan. Heat until mixture starts to clump up and pull away from the sides of the pan,stirring the whole time. When it's all doughy, remove from pan and knead until cool. Store in an airtight container.

Moose Tracks:
Liquid food coloring creates pastel colors (or runny playdough if you use enough). The vibrant colors I achieved were done so by using icing gels. Wilton sells them. They're little jars of concentrated colored gel. They're lovely.

Because Baby Moose and Toddler Moose love to help me in the kitchen, I made sure to knead the dough until it was only warm. Then I split each batch in half and let them have at it.

The cooking time ends up being a good two-ish minutes. This stuff is easy peasy.

Each ball in my ROYGBIV-like rainbo up there is the equivalent to one batch. For comparison purposes, the bags are quart size.

5 comments:

  1. What kind of salt did you use? Might sound silly but I tend to only have sea salt or pickling salt around.

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  2. Funny you ask. I usually have large quantities of various salts on hand. And I assumed so going into the project. Which - of course - means I ended up running out of table salt. So, I used sea salt, pickling salt and fine-ground kosher salt. Pretty much anything with a fine testure. The only salts that ouldn't work are those in rock form. The mixture isn't heated enough to break down large chunks. So, go ahead with whatever salt you wish. It'll work out fine.

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  3. I used Kosher salt and it came out fine, although ours are pastel colored as I hadnt gotten the good colors yet.

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  4. One other thought on this, the consistency is better than regular playdoh but the smell isnt quite right, its missing that chemical smell :) I was toying with the idea of adding something to make it smell nice not sure what yet.

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  5. The smell is off. But I'm okay with that. If you want to scent/flavor your playdough, try using dry Kool-aid. It'll also color the dough.

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