To mix, or not to mix, that is the question...!

Sorry I disappeared for a while there, didn't I?!, We've been away for a few days visiting family in the Lake District.  I don't like to blog about going away until afterwards, otherwise, it feels like shouting 'Hey, our house is empty, come..., break in and steal stuff!'.

The school holidays are plodding along, and today I have been left asking the question, 'Why oh why have I never made home made play dough before?!'  It's so easy.  There are lots of recipes out there to choose from, I can't remember exactly where this version came but this is what we did...,

You will need  ::  2 cups of plain flour, 1 cup of salt, 2 cups of cold water, 4 tablespoons of vegetable oil, and 4 teaspoons of cream of tarter, food colouring (I used red, yellow, blue and green), a large saucepan, wooden spoon, whisk, airtight containers or zip lock bags to store it in and a stove.

Plonk all the ingredients (apart from the food colouring!) in a saucepan on the stove top, and stir.  Now, mine went lumpy at this point so I gave it a quick go with a whisk.  Then turn on the heat, a low heat is all that's needed, and keep stirring with a wooden spoon.  The mixture will gradually thicken, don't worry if more lumps appear at this stage, it will even out when it comes out the pan.  After a couple of minutes, the spoon will become harder and harder to move as it turns into a dough.  At this point, turn off the heat, and turn the dough out onto a work surface and allow to cool.  Then give it a quick kneed, and there you go, that's the cooking part done, now for the messy bit!

This recipe gives a fairly large quantity of playdough, so we split ours into 6, placed each on a glass chopping board, made a well in the centre then added a teaspoon of food colouring (the liquid kind), and kneeded and kneeded until the colour was evenly dispersed, adding more food colouring along the way if the colour was too pale.  We also mixed our colours to get orange and purple.

Luke's favorite is green!

Now the big question amongst us Mums.  Do you let your children mix up their playdough colours??, we have a difference of opinion in our house, I don't mind if they get mixed up to make a yukky brown, which is why all our colours are just chucked into a zip lock bag together.  My theory being by the time all the colours are mashed up, it's drying out and needs replacing anyway.  My husband disagrees, he hates seeing it all mixed up, it really grates on him!  

So, to mix or not to mix, that is the question?!

PS, Thank you for all the foxy feedback, fox number 2 is the out and out winner by far!  I shall be asking opinions on softie patterns more often, that was huge success!