Play Dough: Recipe to Amaze & Entertain the Kids & Grandkids!

(Two of our grandsons, Nate and Titus, happily making their own creations and Poppy & Nonny's house.)

Make this recipe in a jiffy, and you will never buy commercial stiff, smelly, easily-dried out play dough again.

This dough stays soft in a Ziploc bag for months and months. It also handles being left out of the bag, without drying out.

Nate & Titus, age 4 and 2, played with it for 3 hours today! So you get an awful lot of playtime creative bang for your buck. I bought a big bag of plastic cookie cutters at an antique store for $2.00 and then gave the boys plastic knives, forks and spoons and a rolling pin. Nate normally has a hard time staying interested in any one toy for long, but play dough fun allowed his creative mind to go wild.

(Nate, wearing his Batman costume while rolling out play dough. Super Heroes cook too!)

In addition, its fun to watch how quickly it comes together on the stove, which can impress the kids.

Best Ever Play-Dough

Ingredients:

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup water
1 Tablespoon oil
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
Food coloring by drops

Begin by mixing the salt and flour together, then add the rest of the ingredients.
Cook and stir with a wooden spoon over medium heat. (Easiest if you use a nonstick Teflon-type pan, and I prefer to use a big soup pan because it comes together faster.) It will get thicker, and look lumpy. Turn heat down a bit at this point but keep stirring until it turns in to one big smooth round ball of dough, following the spoon around the pan. Cook until you can touch it (carefully, obviously it is hot!) without it sticking to your finger.

Immediately turn out dough onto cool counter. When cool to touch, knead it a bit and then, it is ready to go. Keep in Ziploc bag (with air squished out of it) when not in use.