After Mitch and I made several batches of homemade play dough we decided to combine a few recipes into one ULTIMATE no fail method. You don’t even need your stove top!
This recipe is so easy you’ll be making up ALL the colors you can get your hands on. The dough is not sticky and guess what?? It smells GREAT!
Play Dough Secret Ingredient: Glycerin
This recipe only has one “off the wall” ingredient: glycerin. It’s a thick sugar based liquid that often used as a moisturizer…and sweetener. Go figure.
Add it to your dough for extra shine–just like the stuff from the toy aisle! It will also keep your dough from drying out quickly.
Don’t even think about skipping it! Sure, the dough will still be fantastic with awesome color and wonderful smell. But the color will get dull if it’s allowed to dry out a bit–which will happen after you have a good long play session with your dough.
You can find glycerin in the pharmacy aisle or with cake decorating supplies.
How to Store Homemade Play Dough
The best way to store your new collection of play dough is in tightly sealed zip bags. This recipe makes about a cup of dough per batch, so a quart sized bag would be perfect. We’re keeping ours in gallon bags–because that’s what we have on hand.
I’m keeping each color in a separate bag. The dough is delightfully soft and stays that way for weeks with proper storage!
Like store bought Play-Doh, your homemade dough can be refreshed with a drop of water. Just get it a LITTLE bit moist and stick it back in a zip bag overnight.
Full video instructions are over on Youtube!
Super Shiny Playdough
Super soft and shiny play dough
Materials
- 1 Cup Flour
- 1 Cup Water
- 1/4 Cup Salt
- 1 Packet Kool Aid (your color of choice)
- 1 Tablespoon Vegetable Oil
- 1/2 Teaspoon Glycerin
Tools
- Large Bowl
- Spoon
- Silicone Mat or wax paper
Instructions
- Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl.
- Add oil, glycerin and hot tap water to a microwave safe bowl.
- Stir until well mixed.
- Microwave on high for 30 seconds, then stir.
- Return it to the microwave for another 30 seconds.
- Check it again–if it’s quite thick and hard to stir, dump it on a piece of wax paper. (If it’s not, give it another 30 seconds).
Let it cool enough to work with, then kneed the dough until it’s not sticky.
Notes
For our RAINBOW of colors we used: Cherry, Orange, Lemonade, Lemon Lime, Blue Raspberry, and Grape flavors of Kool Aid. The blue Raspberry was more sky blue than I was hoping for, but you could always tweak the color with some extra food coloring.
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For our RAINBOW of colors we used: Cherry, Orange, Lemonade, Lemon Lime, Blue Raspberry, and Grape. The blue Raspberry was more sky blue than I was hoping for, but you could always tweak the color with some extra food coloring.
If your kid is interested in art, you can make three batches in the primary colors: cherry red, blue raspberry, lemonade yellow. Now experiment with mixes the colors together to see what you get!
