Homemade Play dough

 As those of you in our neck of the woods are well aware of , it's freakin' hot outside! We REALLY love finding things to do in the house because 105 degree heat makes for very hot slides, swings, car seats, you name it! We don't even walk to the park one block from the house.

We thought we would try out a homemade play dough recipe and see how it would do in place of store bought. My girls love play dough, but they especially love mixing all the colors together into one giant mess. Oh, and leaving it out to dry! This makes play dough fairly expensive around here so this recipe was perfect because I don't have to run to the store and pick up fresh play dough.

We made four batches of the recipe into pink, light blue/green, yellow , and a light purple. I didn't use regular food color, but I had a big box of Wilton decorator colors ( that I use for cake decorating ) and thought those would work fine.

Homemade Play dough

1 cup flour

1 cup water

2 tsp cream of tartar

1/3 cup (yes, cup) salt

1 tbsp vegetable oil

food coloring

In medium saucepan, mix 1 cup flour, cream of tartar and salt.

Add 1 cup water and 1 tbsp oil.

Turn burner on medium low and stir well, will be a little lumpy.

Keep stirring until it starts getting somewhat thick. ( If there are still a few lumps, you can work them out when kneading). Once it reaches this point, add the food coloring.  ( this will take any where from about 1 to 3 minutes , approximately)

Now it will start getting almost solid, keep stirring and once it starts to gather on the spoon, it's done.

Remove dough from the saucepan and place on wax paper to cool. Once cooled slightly, knead for a minute or two to work out any lumps and give it a more smooth texture.

I actually split each batch in half, then stored one half for later. The remaining half, I divided between the girls so they each have about 1/4 batch of each color; the recipe makes quite a bit.

Of course , we had to get the cookie cutters out too. We have tons of play dough accessories from birthdays and Christmas, but they didn't even ask for any of those!

The play dough actually keeps pretty well too. I've had the other half of the four batches stored in a container in the pantry for over a week now and it's still soft. If it gets dried out a little, you can always just add a drop or two of water.