With only a couple of simple ingredients and a few minutes of your time, you can easily make Playdough at home for your kids to enjoy. And, guess what? It's not as messy as the real stuff.
How many of you moms and dads have a love/hate relationship with store-bought Play-Doh? I love it because it keeps a child busy for minutes upon minutes. I hate it because it crumbles and is entirely messy! Because of this, I stopped buying it for Judah and requested his grandparents not buy it for him, as well.
Then I started feeling bad that I was taking this fun part of his life away. What child doesn't have memories of playing with Play-Doh!? Of course, my most vivid childhood memory of Play-Doh was watching a classmate in preschool take a huge bite out of his dough, then crying because it tasted so bad.
But, was I stifling Judah's creativity?
When we lived in Southern California, a good friend from our church introduced me to homemade playdough. It was right before we moved across the country, though, so I never snatched her recipe. Or, if I did, we never had the time to make it before packing up and leaving. Fast forward to a few months ago - I decided to finally look up a recipe and try making it myself.
Great decision!
I could not believe how easy it was to make playdough in my own kitchen! It was so easy, in fact, that I ended up making a few batches right in a row. It took up maybe a half hour of my time to make three total batches. That's nothing!
Judah had fun picking out the colors he wanted, then continued to play with the dough for hours. It is still a favorite way to spend his play time.
We store ours in quart sized zipper bags, and use our big batch of cookie cutters to cut out fun shapes with the dough. The dough stays together much better than store-bought Play-Doh and it doesn't smell bad at all. But, as curious as you may be, don't even try to take a bite out of it. I may or may not be speaking out of experience... <A-hem! Cough-Cough!>
Recipe Card
Easy DIY Homemade Playdough
Ingredients
- 1 cup water
- 2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- ¼ cup salt
- 2 Tablespoons cream of tartar
- Gel-based food coloring
Instructions
- In a medium to large sized saucepan, mix together the water and vegetable oil. Stir in the flour, salt and cream of tartar. Mix in drops of food coloring until it reaches your desired shade of color.
- Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until the dough forms into a ball and is no longer sticky. This will take around 4-5 minutes and will go through different stages of looking smooth to chunky to crumbly. But, keep stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan. It will eventually form a dough ball and will pull away from the sides of the pan.
- Remove dough from the pan and transfer to a paper plate or wax paper to cool. Once it is cool enough to handle, knead the dough until smooth. This part is fun for the kids!
- Store the finished playdough at room temperature in a quart-size plastic zipper bag.
- Source: Artsy Fartsy Mama
Notes
Nutrition
