Playdough 2 ways

I'd like to introduce you to my guest blogger, Rowan!  Rowan is 7 years old and is the big brother to my friend Madan (age 2) who I spend my days with while my kids are at school.  I was lucky enough to spend a little quality time with Rowan last week since he was on school vacation!  We decided it would be a great time to test out two homemade playdough recipes! 

As you probably know, there are countless recipes for playdough all over the Internet.  But, which is best?  I know a lot of people swear by the "no cook" method, while I had only ever made the stove top playdough.  Rowan and I decided to test two recipes, play with it and decide which was best.  So, here we go!

The first recipe we tried was an Easy No-Cook Playdough Recipe.  You can find it here.  What we liked most about this, was that it incorporated cold water and we knew it would be easily made by little hands.  You'll need the basics for this one (water, oil, flour and food coloring) and also cream of tartar.  This dough was very sticky.  Rowan and I decided we needed to add flour and let it sit out for a bit so that it would be a little dryer.  While we waited, we got to work on recipe #2.  You can find that one here.  The ingredients were pretty much the same however, this one required a saucepan and constant stirring over medium heat.  Once the dough started to pull away from the sides, it was ready to be transferred to a bowl.  This was the tricky part.  If you're making playdough with helpers, it's much too hot for kids to manipulate at this stage.  It needs to cool before they can help add the color. 

The verdict...the color adhered to all the dough well but it does require a lot of food coloring and easily stains (I don't think my hands will ever be the same!) Overall, the cook play-dough was better to play with because it was less sticky and easily moldable!

Either way, a fun way to spend a morning!  Thanks to Rowan and Madan for the help and Rowan, who suggested this blog post!