My son is very fond of playing with play dough and there is never enough. Hence I have been trying to make play dough at home. I tried several times with different recipes. Most of them failed either because the consistency was not as expected, or in some cases the dough was too elastic or brittle. Finally, I found a recipe that worked pretty well. Here I’m sharing the same:
You will need:
- All purpose flour 2.5 cups
- Water 2 cups
- Salt 1 cup
- Cream of tartar 4 tsp
- Vegetable oil 1 tbsp
- Food color
- Zip lock bags and boxes
Steps:
- Mix all purpose flour, salt and cream of tartar together in a bowl.
- Add water and veg oil to it.
- Mix well until no lumps are seen.
- Heat a pan on low to medium heat.
- Transfer the mixture to the pan.
- Stir until it gets a thick paste like consistency.
- Take it off the stove and cool it down.
- Kneed it well.
- Divide the dough into the number of different colors needed.
- Add food color to each and kneed well until the color is uniformly distributed.
- Divide each color into two portions, one for immediate use and the other for storage in refrigerator. The portion for immediate use can be kept in small containers. I had saved the play dough containers that we had bought before and used it for this purpose. For the storage portion you can use zip locks.
- Keep refrigerated when not in use.
Suggestions:
- To get better color and consistency use gel food colors instead of liquid colors.
- In case the dough turns out to be loose, try kneeding it with fresh flour until you achieve the right consistency.
- If the dough seems moistened after being in refrigerator add some fresh flour and kneed the dough.
It was a hit with my excited little beanie. We loved the whole experience of making it and playing with it. If you try this recipe at home please leave a comment and let me know how it turned out.