My daughter loooves play dough. Months back, I was inspired to make homemade
play dough from a youtube tutorial (sorry, can’t remember which one anymore)
and although it ended up as a sort of gooey mess, she loved playing with it –
kneading, rolling, folding, forming it.
She was at it for a long time, beating my DIY attention span. When she was done playing with it, we kept it
in an airtight plastic container and to my surprise, it kept for months. She would take it out more often than I
thought she would and use it as “food” for her homemade toy kitchen.
Fast forward to days ago...I was sorting out her Play-Doh toys
and realized that the canisters were out of (duh...what else but) play
dough! They had dried up because they
were not returned properly into the airtight containers or they had been
shredded to bits in the process of making “ice cream.” So we were back on YouTube. I found this YouTube tutorial by candidmommy with the following ingredients:
3 cups of flour
1 tbsp of cream of tartar
½ cup of salt
2 cups of water
4 tbsp oil
Food coloring
Read on before copying this recipe...
My little assistants and I followed the recipe to bits, save
for the cream of tartar which we did not have on hand. I read somewhere that cream of tartar was
meant to add “body” to the dough and as an alternative, you can use lemon
juice. Since we did not have lemons
either, I improvised with two tablespoons of juice from our local lemon,
calamansi.
The procedure was to mix the first three ingredients in a
bowl. Boil two cups of water with the
oil. Pour the hot water and oil mixture
into the dry ingredients in the bowl. Mix
together. Sounded easy.
We did just that but for some odd reason, ended up with an
ooey gooey mess, worse than the one we made months ago. (This is the reason why we do not have a
photo of it. My hands were covered in
goo so I did not dare touch the camera).
Even if it was ooey and gooey, I was too excited to play with the dough
myself and quite in denial, I distributed the slimy goo among the girls! Our hands were all white and slimy and icky
but hey, we were giggling and having fun!
The fun did not stop there.
We got a pack of flour and added a little of it here and there. We must have ended up using half a pack
more. It worked!
(Note to self: next time, slowly add in the water and oil
mixture with the dry ingredients and while mixing, check for the best
consistency. Practice makes perfect.)
Afterwards, we added the food coloring. I had the three primary colors on hand –
yellow, red and blue – and with them, we made six colors of play dough: yellow,
red (which came out more pink than red), blue, green, purple and orange. We also set aside a ball of dough and left it
white to use as vanilla ice cream!
I was so happy because we had so much play dough! The empty Play-Doh canisters could not
contain it all so we got an airtight plastic container to keep it all in.
Also, adding the flour and replacing the cream of tartar
with the calamansi juice worked.
It was a happy play dough day! The girls played for about three hours with the
homemade play dough and Play-Doh Cake and Ice Cream Confections Set.
 |
| This was the true test of consistency. Piping frosting onto the "ice cream" was easy enough for little hands! ; ) |
 |
| Another test of consistency - no leftover gunk on cupcake maker. Fabulous! |
 |
| They made this all by themselves! Yummy-looking ice cream and sundae! |
Some things we achieved through play: following step-by-step
directions (*Cough* Well, somehow...),
improvising, taking turns, sharing, developing hand muscle control and mixing
primary colors to make secondary colors.
Priceless.
).
