Best Homemade Play Dough Ever!

If you've been an O+P reader for a while, you may have seen that I've made some improvements along the way. But, if you're new, here's a look at some of my older posts (back in the day, beginning blogger stuff).  My mom's recipe for The Best Play Dough Ever is going crazy on Pinterest right now.  And I'm kind of embarrassed of the pictures. While the pictures I take now are far from perfect, I'm definitely proud of what I've learned and how far I've come on this blogging journey.   

So, I thought I should re-post this recipe and show it packaged all cute like and photographed a lot better. Understand that I'm still using the same camera as I did when I started blogging, I've just learned so much more about how and where to use it.  

This year, Olivia is going to give her friends cute little packages of homemade play dough wrapped  as pumpkins and ghosts.  I simply rolled the dough into a ball, placed it in a clear bag, and tied green ribbon around the orange balls of play dough and a little piece of torn gauze around the white ones.  Then I added little triangle and oval eyes that I cut out of black electrical tape.

Play Dough
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
2 tsp. cream of tartar

1 cup warm water
food coloring
2 tbsp. veg. oil

Combine the dry ingredients in a pot.  Combine the wet ingredients in the bowl.

Pour the wet ingredients into the pot with the dry ingredients and stir with a whisk.  Try to get out as many of the lumps as possible.  Put the pot on the stove on Med-high heat and continue stirring.

Stir with whisk until the dough begins to thicken, then change to a spoon.  The dough will become very thick. Cook and stir until the dough forms a ball and pulls away from the sides of the pan.

Remove from the pan and it is done!  Allow the dough to cool for a few minutes. (PS the pan looks like you'll never get it clean, but just let it sit in some water for a minute or so and it comes clean immediately). 

This dough is soft and pliable and it lasts a really long time.  My kids prefer it over the store bought kind.  Oh, and because it has so much salt, it tastes really bad and kids don't want to eat it (and if they do, there is nothing in it that will hurt them).  I'm going to try to make it with rice flour this week for a gluten/grain free option for friends with allergies.  

You can refer to the original post for pictures of the cooking process.

This is a great non-candy Halloween treat. And it's really inexpensive to make, each batch made 6 cute portions to be wrapped and gifted.