Play Dough

Okay, so this one was really only an experiment for me, but I'm still counting it.  

My Mom used to make edible playdough for us when we were kids (not that we ate it, it tasted pretty much like salt).  I asked her for the recipe last year, and decided to try it this morning.

Here is the recipe:

1 cup all purpose flour

1/4 cup iodized salt

1 cup water

1 Tbsp vegetable oil

food colouring is desired

Cook until it forms a ball.

These were the instructions she gave me.  Cook until it forms a ball?  Alrighty.  Here we go.

I mixed up four "batches" so that I was ready to go with the cooking portion one right after the other.  I had blue, red, yellow and green food colouring in the cupboard, so, you can probably guess which colours we ended up with... ;)

RED!  Just thought I'd point that out.  Anyways, I had four of these bowls of mess sitting on my counter when I started.

Obviously, had not reached "ball" status yet.  I have a gas stove, so I cooked mine over medium heat.  Be aware that you kind of have to pay attention to this, but you don't have to constantly stir it.  I tried adding different extracts to each batch, but they really just smell like salt, so unless you want to add a LOT of extract, I would jut skip this step.

When it finally formed a ball, I put it on the counter, scraped the pot, then started on the next.

As you can see, there was flour on the counter so that it wouldn't stick, then when it cooled enough, I just shook off as much flour as I could, then kneaded what was still stuck on, and let it finish cooling on the counter.

TADA!!!  I know, not that impressive.  But WAY easier than I thought it was going to be, and I like the feel of this play dough much better than the store bought kind.  This is way cheaper, and at least I know when Little Dude wants to eat his "pretend" food, it isn't going to have any long term effects.

Happy cooking!