Cooking Connections: Making Play Dough

Besides being ridiculously cheap and easy, making homemade play dough is a great way to introduce a young child to the practice of cooking in its most basic form, and presents a tangible result that may have greater impact than food that is eaten and then forgotten. Z has been very interested in play dough lately, so we made two batches the other day, with Z enthusiastically taking on the role of "cooker man" (her invented term) and doing most of the measuring, pouring, stirring and adulterating, with the help of me and her Learning Tower. In the spirit of Food Week, we thought we'd do a quick run-through of how to make great homemade play dough.

Mix the following ingredients in a pot:

1 c. flour
1 c. warm water
2 t. cream of tartar
1 t. oil
1/4 c. salt

I let Z do all of the measuring of ingredients except for the oil (it's in a big bottle and I didn't relish the idea of cleaning up spilled oil) and the salt (because, well, I'm superstitious and spilled salt is bad luck!). The recipe works fine with estimations of the above amounts of ingredients - I only had about 1/8 of a cup of salt for my second batch, and I think we got more than 2 teaspoons of the cream of tartar in the first batch, but the results were similar and both were great.

Z poured everything into the pot, then gave it a good stir over medium heat. When I declared it thoroughly mixed, she delighted in squeezing copious amounts of food coloring into the mixture.

Stirring will eventually get too rough for your child to handle, and you'll need to take over.

When your play dough is the consistency of the above photos, scrape it out onto a cutting board and knead it thoroughly. This is tricky, because it's hot. Best to poke and prod at it yourself a bit, and get the initial, messiest kneading taken care of, then handing it off to your toddler to finish up, or breaking it into one large and one small piece.

Z adored this play dough, and it was so easy that I went ahead and made a second batch while she played with the first.

Below, Z prepares her signature dish, half-circles ingeniously molded in half an Easter egg.

A few days later, Jeremiah made a third batch.

There are a few things that make this play dough recipe stand head and shoulders above the storebought stuff:

• Custom colors: I used Wilton icing color for the vibrant pink color. The blue is standard-issue, storebought food coloring.
• None of that odd Play-Doh smell
• Smoother and more pliable, less crumbly
• Very cheap, and produced in much larger batches for maximum fun
  
• Your child can do it "all by myself" (with your help) and create their own plaything
  

Just make sure you store your play dough in an airtight bag when you're finished with it for the day, and it will last until it gets dirty. Don't be surprised if your toddler quickly blends the colors into one!