Monday Made: Mock ice-cream play dough

Hello!  The in-laws are here for the week, so I took some time on Sunday to make play dough while they played with the little boy (since my mum had some food colourings that have just past their best before date, and we didn't want to waste them...).

I grabbed the play dough recipe off this site, but the recipe I used was the non-cooked version shared by one of the readers in the comments section instead.  However, I modified it slightly as I went along, so here's my version of how to make play dough that doesn't require cooking:

Ingredients: 
1 cup of flour
1/3 cup of salt
1 cup water
Food colouring (and flavourings if you want)
2 tbsp vegetable oil

Steps:
1. Mix salt and flour together. (The original instructions also included the oil, but I find it causes clumping for some parts and doesn't get mixed evenly, so add the oil last!)

2. Add food colouring to water and stir using a spoon.  (If you want to make a few colours, you may want to split the dry mixture into 4 parts. Add 2-3 drops of food colouring to 1/4 cup of water, and add to 1 part of your flour.  You can add flavourings to the liquid mixture too!)

3. Add the water in portions to the dry mixture and mix together.

4. Knead the dough using your hands, then add the oil during the kneading process.

I used red and egg yolk yellow food colourings, and tried adding orange flavour to the yellow dough... So this is what I ended up with:

The process was pretty messy but fun, and the nice thing is you can involve the kids in the process if they are old enough, since this is a no cook version!  Also, kneading all that oil helped to moisturize my really dry hands...  The dough was really smooth but not as dense as the usual play dough, so it got smeared all over the boy's hands when I let him play with it... However, the texture and colour really reminds me of ice-cream, so for those with kids that are experimenting with play kitchens, this would really be good to fill your ice-cream tubs with!  The kids can experiment scooping this out with an ice-cream scoops and if flavours are added, they'll smell like the real thing, but won't melt and dribble!  (Unfortunately of course, they can't be eaten...)

I'm still on the hunt for an easy to make play dough recipe and my mum is going to show me her version next week.  I prefer giving the boy the home-made version rather than the store-bought types, since you know that the dough contains only food grade ingredients, and you can control the colour and flavours that you add to it... If the recipe works, I'll be sure to post it up!

Have a great week ahead!