Kool-Aid colored play dough

Nico is a big fan of play dough, but it would tend to dry out after a while and you’d be somewhat limited in what it would allow you to do, Valérie wanted to do some fun Christmas ornaments and she found a post on “The Magic Onions” that gave us a great recipe to do our own play dough, that also is great for baking. Many other posts had mentioned that you had to add extra water or flour to the dough after and during  the mixing process, this one was the only one that did not, so we figured to give it a shot and see, if we could give it our own twist, which is to color (and in the end scent) it with Kool-Aid powder (an idea kindly borrowed from Meet The Dubiens).

To start things off – here’s the recipe:

• 3 cups of flour
• 1/2 cups of salt
• 2 tbs cream of Tartar
• 2 tbs vegetable oil
• 2 cups of boiling water
• packets of Kool-Aid (different flavors, different colors)

At first Nico took all of the dry ingredients (flour, salt and the cream of tartar) into the mixing bowl, since for him most numbers are still “quatre” (French for “four”), we helped him out with the measurements.

Next up were the oil and the boiling water, for the oil Valérie poured it into the measuring spoon and Nico added it to the dry mix, for the boiling water, obviously, we took care of it.

Because of the heat of the dough, at first everything has to be stirred with a wooden spoon (Nico is careful enough to keep everything in the bowl, but supervision is recommended), but you can only get it to a really crumbly consistency, once things have cooled down enough, you start to knead it with your hands, incorporating all of the dry ingredients into the dough. The nice thing about this recipe is that the dough stays nicely smooth and does not stick! Once we had everything together, we separated the batch into two parts before adding the Kool-Aid powder for coloring (we had gone Christmas and used lime (green) and cherry (red), the colors came out a little pale, so to get some more vibrant colors, it would be better to separate it into four even parts, we’ll know better for next time…

After that we kneaded and kneaded some more until we get an even distribution of color and voila, we had ourselves some great play dough with a nice color and it also smells great (another big difference to regular play dough)!

As you can see here, the Kool-Aid powder will also stain your hands a little while kneading, but it will wash off with a good scrub.

For storage, we keep it in a ziploc bag in the fridge, so it will last for a long time!

If you do this, we’d LOVE to see a photo of it. Email it to us or post it on our Facebook page. We’d love to do a Facebook album, a Pinterest board and a page of your creations

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