Something different- dirt playdough

I love how the interwebs can lead you on a journey to discover lots of new ideas for stuff to do with kids. I am always bookmarking ideas but never actually do them but when I saw this one I thought it was time to give something a go.

I saw this link for dirt playdough on the great site Playopedia set up by Childhood 101.

You can access the link directly here and seeing we regularly play with homemade playdough I thought why not mix it up a bit and do something different from the normal food colouring. The idea is to add cocoa to give it a dirt/brown colour.

I like to make my playdough using a non-cook method from the book Small Fry, Inspiration for Cooking with Kids by Susie Cameron and Katrina Cook.

The recipe requires the combination of:

• 1 cup salt
  
  
• 2 cups plain flour
  
  
• 2 tablespoons cream of tartar

Mix these together then add 2 cups boiling water and 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil (combined) and of course your desired colouring. In this instance though I added a 1/2 to 3/4 cup of cocoa powder to give the "dirt" appearance. Now mix it all together, turn out onto a floured bench and knead it together

Overall the mix was slightly stickier than normal but some extra flour helped with this. I have to say it smells so yummy, a bit like a chocolate cake!

We used ours to make tracks with the tyres on our cars and rolled it into balls to make rocks, the next day it became ice cream for pretend ice cream cones. One week on it still smells great and I have enjoyed trying something different to the normal food colouring.

Why not give it a try the next time you make some play dough!

Do you like making playdough or do you buy it? Do you add anything to your mix to make it a bit different?

Jen