Josie and I made homemade playdoh last Saturday and it's provided quite the week of entertainment so far. Josie knew what playdoh was before, but we've never really had it around our house, and I remember making it with my mom. I couldn't remember mom's recipe exactly except for the fact that it needed Alum, this weird white spice that I think people only use to make homemade playdoh. So I googled around until I found some recipes, some had weird ingredients or complicated cooking steps so I kinda took bits that I liked and combined them to get to this simplified conclusion, which worked pretty well:

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 tablespoon alum
1/2 hot cup water, with a few drops of food coloring (makes mixing simpler)
1 tablespoon vegetable or olive oil

Mix everything together, if it's soupy then microwave it for 30 seconds. Then mix again. Then microwave again. Then mix again. Then microwave a third time. By now it'll be still pretty thin for playdough but you can kinda start getting your fingers in it, kneed it with some flour on the mat until you're satisfied. (I will say that the second time I made this, it needed no microwaving... maybe I mis-recorded the water used on the first round? Hell, I'll never be a pinterest mommy).

For reference: Alum is in the spice aisle. In the As.

Play away, then put it in a ziplock in the fridge when you're done and take it out the next day, or whenever, ours is keeping pretty well. And yes it seems cold coming out of the fridge but it doesn't take much hand contact to warm it up again.

Josie, age 2.5, wasn't great at making snakes and balls and other things we tried to teach her but she LOVED taking a knife to the stuff, all week she's been hanging out with a butter knife just chopping up the playdough, making "vegetable soup" or ham or cake or whatever she's making, it's cute. And since the homemade stuff costs like thirty cents or whatever to make, I figure she could just play until she's sick of it or it dries out and then we'll make more.

It's a lot like the stuff you buy except not as crumbly, not as artificial-colored looking, and you get a huge hunk of it from just this little recipe. Definitely easy and makes buying the stuff seem lame. Mom and I used to make it for neighborhood kids, like for Christmas presents, they were always very impressed.