Well I have seen homemade Playdoh recipes about a zillion times this summer. It seems like every time we go to a festival, we get a little sample of homemade playdoh and a recipe card. I have seriously collected several of these so far and I played with a few recipes to see what worked best.
This is the recipe that I liked and it really does take just a few minutes. I have a little lady that LOVES Playdoh time and so we decided this was a must for our Summer Fun List.
I actually prefer homemade playdoh because I found the clean up was a little easier. The bits that fell into the carpet usually make a huge mess with normal stuff you buy but the homemade variety came up much easier for me.
One tip is that you have to commit to the Playdoh- once you start cooking it takes just a few minutes so don’t decide now is a good time to empty the trash… or all of the trash cans in the house… and then take the dumpster down to the curb… and then have a quick chat with the neighbor. You might burn your Playdoh and it doesn’t smell good if it burns. Just sayin.
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup flour
- ½ cup salt
- 2 tea cream of tarter
- 1 tbl vegetable oil
- food coloring
- vanilla or essential oils (optional)
- In a large saucepan set the heat to medium-low and add flour, salt and cream of tarter.
- Give that a mix- you can reduce the amount of salt. I actually had a little less then half a cup in my batch because we were low on salt.
- Add the water and vegetable oil.
- Go ahead and stir, stir, stir until it sort of looks like mashed potatoes.
- Once it starts feeling a little hard to stir go ahead and add your food coloring.
- Keep stirring until it looks like mashed potatoes and you can take it off the heat.
- You want the mixture to start pulling away from the edges of your pan and to start really clumping around the spoon.
- Remove from the pan and place on wax paper or into a bowl to cool.
So that about explains it. This should make about 3 containers worth of normal playdoh. I wanted three colors so I just waited to add the food coloring until it was done and I divided the dough into three bowls and added the food color and mixed by hand.
If you want to skip food coloring, you could also try really brightly colored juices like carrot juice and that might give you a little color. You can also add fragraces- like lemon for the yellow, orange for orange, strawberry for red, lavender for purple etc… Plain old vanilla would work too. I skipped this step because I don’t want to encourage eating the dough (and mine will eat it.)
Now this will last a long time- probably 6 months or so if your children are more careful then mine are. I just ball it up when we are done playing and stick it in baggies in the fridge.
Now it is time to play! If your mix feels a tiny sticky at first, don’t worry once it is cooled off it really feels just like playdoh.
This should take you about 10 minutes or even less total and the kiddos will be very impressed! I think this would be a very cute idea for birthday party favors and much cheaper then buying Playdoh.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Kool aid packets work great for color and scent too. More tempting though if you have little playdoh eaters!
This looks like the recipe I used tor play dough when my kids where young. Here’s a tip, use mineral or baby oil instead of vegetable oil. Vegetable oil will eventually go rancid and your play dough will smell. Baby oil is essentially mineral oil with fragrance.
Thanks Denise!
just saying…you made me laugh out loud