Mixing it up with homemade play clay, er, dough

You know, I actually prefer the term "play dough," as we never actually put any of our creations in the oven (which is what "clay" seems to involve). So about the play dough — first of all, I didn't post about it a day later like I said I would. Somehow I knew that would happen. I had good intentions, but with the kids going to bed at 10 (!) and me having a beer with Alex while watching The Rachel Maddow Show ... nope, it wasn't happening. I would've written during the day, but excuses, excuses, and I hadn't tried a different play-dough recipe till the evening. So anyway, enough shoulds and buts. Let's try this again.

So about the play dough, I enjoy finding homemade recipes for store-bought products, particularly kids craft materials. Sure, you can easily spend a few bucks on several tubs of Play-Doh, but it's more gratifying and fun to make it yourself. And talk about sensory input! Play dough already provides amazing tactile stimulation, but a sweet scent from vanilla extract or Kool-Aid engages the olfactory sense as well. But enough drivel — on with the recipes!

I have made two general variations of play dough: cooked and uncooked. If your child is helping to create the play dough, for safety's sake, make the uncooked version. The recipe below is from my favorite source for made-from-scratch goodness: Homemade: how to make hundreds of everyday products fast, fresh, and more naturally, by Reader's Digest.*

Homemade Play Clay

4 cups flour
1 cup salt
1 1/2 cups water

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Mix ingredients together and knead for five minutes. You can divide the dough into portions and add a drop of food coloring [I use one pouch of Kool-Aid for a yummy scent and color] at this point, or model the white "clay" and paint the finished piece. Put unused clay into sealed plastic bags and use within four hours of mixing.
2. Place finished pieces on a cookie sheet and bake for one hour (until hard).

That recipe is great for a quick fix, but GardenMama's version (scroll to the bottom of the page) is my favorite. It produces a smoother texture, and although it takes a little longer to whip up ...

... the end result is worth it.

Right now Mia has the most fun playing bakery or scooping "ice cream." And we've already determined that Max has only licked the stuff, not ingested it.

Keep in mind that both versions of this dough will dry out if left unwrapped. The uncooked version won't dry out completely after four hours, but it will become gritty. When you're making ice cream with pipe cleaner "cherries," though, who cares?

*I can't resist noting that the book on Amazon contains a hyphen in its title ("how-to"), but my copy — which has the correct version of "how to," does not! Have I mentioned that I used to be a copy editor?