Playdough Bakery

Well, the kids asked to make a cake shop, but it was more like a bakery followed by a tea party where the bakery staff sang happy birthday to inanimate objects and then pretended to eat all the cakes.

I used to make playdough the way that involved no cooking, but that stuff was kinda gross to be honest. I mean it worked, but it needed more flour adding a lot of the time and stuck to your hands or caked onto the tools and stuck like Araldite when it dried hard.

I came across a "playclay" recipe on Lovelydesign (great blog by the way) with photos showing lovely unsticky, brightly coloured dough that obviously rolled out easily. It was the photos there that encouraged me to try the recipe, so I got out the cream of tartar and a big old nonstick saucepan.

Lovelydesign's recipe is really simple and quick to make and the dough that we made from her recipe turned out beautifully.
It's just 2 cups of water, 4 teaspoons of cream of tartar, a squidge of food colouring and a cup of salt heated together in a pan until the salt is as disolved as it's going to get, then put in 4 tablespoons of oil (I used veg oil) and then 2 cups of plain/all purpose flour. Stir it up until it gloops into a ball that doesn't stick to the sides of the pan, then turn it out and knead it with a little more flour until it's cool enough for the kids to play with. Store in an airtight container like you would with any other playdough.
I put in some coconut extract into the white dough and some vanilla into the brown, so it smelled a bit bakeryish while we were making the "cakes"

The kids had a good time putting the dough into paper cases and some mini metal tartlett thingies, then using more dough as icing and adding candles and beads to decorate them. I made a swiss roll and chopped it up for them to play with too.

I had some mini paper doilies that they decorated the plates with and when they were done making lots of cute cupcakes and one monstrously gigantic porcupine brain cake thing we set up a tea party on the coffee table in the livingroom.Guests were invited from the bedroom and according to the girls it was "everyone's birthday" Even the baby got fed cake (the baby that always has to have selotape on it's head. Don't ask). I love my 1970s cornflower table cloth by the way. Yay Goodwill!

I thought it was funny that the girls wanted to wear aprons to do all this, when we tend not to bother with aprons much, even with the messier crafts, but they obviously think that you need to wear aprons in a bakery, so we did.