A Monday Recipe: Fruit-Scented Play Clay!

The boys call this stuff  "play clay" rather than play dough because they're really into the old Mr. Roger's Neighborhood shows, and their favorite is one where he has "play clay" he's made himself (white), and then later he goes to a ceramics studio and learns to throw clay on a wheel. It's a pretty good episode.(or, etta-sewed, as William says)


I found this recipe on another blog, and she has made a lovely set of primary and secondary colors with hers.
It's at Mama Jen and she calls it Kool Aid Play Dough. It's a great recipe (it works, in other words), but she lists the ingredients out of order, and gives no description of what to expect as you're making it, so the first time I did it, I was freaking out that I was doing something wrong and had nothing to refer to.


Ingredients:  
1 cup flour 
1 package unsweetened Kool Aid mix  
1/4 cup salt 
2 Tbsp. cream of tartar 

1 cup water
1 Tbsp. vegetable oil 

Yield, 1lb play clay.
The instructions: put all the dry ingredients into a pan. Whisk to blend.

Measure your water, and then add the oil to it.

Over medium heat, stir the water into the flour mixture.

Stir and stir. It will have exactly the lumps you would expect from stirring water into flour.

Keep cooking and stirring until it starts thickening up like this. At this point, change to a sturdy spatula or wooden spoon.

Continue stirring.

when it's pretty thick and will stay in a firm-ish ball without being TOO sticky when you touch it, remove from heat.

Glop the whole ball onto a board, using the spatula to scrape out the inside of the pan.

Need the dough several times to distribute the flour and water evenly throughout.

Form into a smooth ball and let cool. The pink and purple were made the day before and were already cool.
Once cool, store in an air-tight container. In my opinion, this play clay has a much better texture than the store-bought kind, plus it smells nice!

For the vivid blue, I actually used TWO drink mix packets. Adding more drink mix packets will not mess up the formula, I don't think (with in reason...probably 10 packets would be a mistake). I'm not sure of the cost effectiveness of this recipe, because while I did buy the cheaper drink mix, cream of tartar cost nearly $3 for an amount that would make only two batches. So, $1.50 worth of cream of tartar, plus the other ingredients.

Clean up is easy. The play clay comes RIGHT out of the pan, and the colors don't stain anything. Go make some fun!