More Christmas Gifting

So, tonight I decided that I would try some homemade playdough. I figured that I would probably end up making a couple of batches with a couple of different recipes before I decided which one was easiest/I liked best. I was completely wrong. The very first one that I came to, which can be found here, worked perfectly well. There are several recipes on this website, but I went with my gut and used the first one. I, luckily, had already been planning on making some playdough, so I went to the Dollar Tree yesterday and picked up some amazing containers.

It's funny how perfect they are... I made 7 complete batches of playdough today, using that very recipe that I linked, AND each batch fits into exactly 6 of these containers. It's almost like they were meant for each other. Hah! I ended up going back to the Dollar Tree this evening for 4 more packages, a total of 6, and now I have some left over... but I'm super- happy about this because I know I'll find another amazing use for them. I'll tell you later what I'm even happier about.


Here are the ingredients... one cup of flour, 1/2 cup of  salt, 1 Tbsp of cream of tartar, 1 Tbsp of oil (the recipe calls for vegetable oil, but I used canola oil), and food coloring.

First, add the salt in a small or medium saucepan:

Then the flour:  

Of course, if you're feeling crazy you could probably do the flour first, and the salt second. But only if you're feeling crazy.

 Add the cream of tartar:

The oil:

Finally the water. We didn't take a picture of the water. I'm going to assume that we all have a good mental image of water in a measuring cup and proceed to the food coloring.

I actually added a few more drops of blue after I stirred this up a bit, and the end result was very nice.

I made sure that all of my ingredients were mixed very well before turning on the heat. This gave me an opportunity to work through all of the flour clumps that had formed before the mixture started to morph into a solid.  You want to make sure that you use either the low or medium heat setting on your burner, and definitely no higher. Keep stirring from start to finish, otherwise you may have a lot of trouble keeping things consistent... I noticed that at one point when I turned my back to put some wax paper down on the counter (so that I could leave the playdough to cool when it was done), which took all of 30 seconds, my playdough started to form massive clumps around the inside edges of my saucepan, while the center was still very much a liquid. It took a lot of hard stirring and manipulating to come back from that. I'd say it took a good 3 or 4 solid minutes of stirring with each batch to get to the perfect consistency. You'll know when you reach that point, for sure. It's really, really easy to stir for more than half of the time you're standing there, then suddenly it begins to require a bit of elbow grease... this is a good sign. You know you're almost finished at this point.

Your pot will probably look like this:

 As soon as mine was ready to come off the stove, I spooned the mixture out onto a sheet of wax paper to let it cool out before kneading and dividing into those precious little containers.  

Pretty soon I had a massive wall of playdough. I made one without any food coloring for two reasons. The first was because M has been talking nonstop about making a playdough pizza, and I definitely had to provide her with a suitable crust. What I didn't know then was that she considers PINK to be the most suitable crust color. Hmph. My other reason was so that I could have enough playdough to fill my playdough canisters.

You see that sock monkey thing in the background? That's my playdough canister. Otherwise knows as a PRINGLES CAN!!! And that is what I am SO happy about. My husband sometimes thinks it's odd when I ask him to save random things... like a Pringles can, empty oat canisters, or emptied salsa jars. When he came home from work last night, and I was able to show off my upcycling genius, it all started to make a little bit of sense to him. We have a dear friend who has a "thing" for sock monkeys, so we had picked up some sock monkey ribbon and sock monkey scrapbook paper a few weeks ago. I wasn't sure at all at the time what we would do with them... but then, last night, everything fell together when I realized that scrapbook paper would perfectly cover the Pringles can, making the most awesome playdough container ever.

I realize the image isn't that great, but I was having some major issues with the flash in the kitchen. Believe me, in person, it's ridiculously cute. I'm excited to finish all of them. I take that back, I won't lie. I'm excited to eat more Pringles.