
Recipe for bright white play dough:
- 1 cup cornflour (cornstarch in the US)
- 1/2 cup salt
- 1 tbsp oil
- 1 tbsp cream of tartar
- 1 cup boiling (or nearly boiling) water
- few drops liquid glycerine (not essential, but makes it even smoother!)
- silver glitter- optional! (but soooo pretty)
Method:
- Mix all of the dry ingredients in a bowl and add the oil
- Next, pour in the water (adult only if using boiling) and mix it up
- Leave it for a little while to cool down, in which time it will come together more
- Knead it until smooth and soft
- Add in glitter and any scent (if desired)
- If it’s too sticky, add some more cornflour
Play Ideas:
- Roll the white sparkly dough into balls to make snow balls!
- Build snow men and snow castles and decorate them with buttons, twigs and beads
- Roll out the dough with a rolling pin and cut out snowflakes and stars using cutters
- Use it to form part of a small world play snowscape and play with penguins, seals, polar bears etc
Did Cakie want to do any of those lovely ideas I’d had for the dough? Of course not! She wanted to use her own imagination and make glitter-snow-cakes! I love my girl 🙂
And pretty gorgeous they were too. She went and found the beads and stars from the Christmas Sensory Tub nearby and added them into the dough as “sprinkles and decorations” for the top of her cakes.
Then she put them all in a baking tray and cooked them in her imaginary oven, allowed them to cool and served them up to Daddy when he got home from work!
This activity is good for:
- Sensory: exploring materials using the senses
- Motor Skills: rolling, pinching, flattening, squeezing to develop and strengthen hand muscles
- Creativity: using materials to represent other things during play, imaginary play, role play
- Literacy: storytelling and taking on roles and characters through imaginary play
- Maths: counting out cups and spoons, measuring and quantities, full and empty
- Knowledge and Understanding of the World: following recipes, role-play bakery, investigating change of materials from dry to sticky to soft
Cakie: 3 years 4 months
Pop: 21 months
See all our PLAYDOUGH RECIPES here
Try our amazingly fun sensory SNOW recipe here!
Follow our CHRISTMAS themed Pinterest board here
Follow Anna @ The Imagination Tree’s board Christmas Ideas on Pinterest.
I will definitely be using this for our Winter unit! Thanks for sharing!
fantastic! thank you!
This is fantastic! usually we have tons of snow here but not this year…my kids are dying to build snowmen! This will be a darling substitute. Thank you!!
that sounds like a lovely idea and we are desperate for snow too!
We made some white playdough just like this last week to use with the penguins my middle son got for Christmas. He asked for snow. Thanks for sharing your no cook recipe.
LOVE the idea of adding penguins! SO fun
GREAT IDEA! Thanks a bunch!
you’re welcome!
Little Moo Love LOVE L-O-V-E-S playdough, and the more varieties the better. Thank you for sharing this easy recipe which we’ll try soon!
Great!!
We need to make some….maybe tomorrow with a playdate!
I LOVE yours that you just made Melissa!
Oooh, fantastic! Cannot wait to give it a go as I know Immy will love it 🙂
thank you Christie!
oooh, that is beautiful!
thanks Emma!
Thank you for sharing. I love this idea – perfect at Christmas time. WOuld have been great in our Playdough Gift Jars!
would be a GREAT gift idea! love it!
where do you find glycerine? ive been looking all over
Rachel, here in the UK I get it next to the food colourings/ flavourings in a similar size bottle. I have heard some people from other countries say you can buy it at the pharmacy section? Hope that helps!
Oh this looks fab! I think I might try and make a different play dough every month! I need to start making some scented ones, any tips on what you’ve found to work the best?
Thanks xx
Hi Michelle! Any store bought flavouring/ scent intended for cooking with works really well. But my favourites so far have been the more natural ones such as cinnamon, ginger and lavender. If you look at my Playdough tab at the top then you will see lots of other ideas to try too!
just found this through a link from The Chocolate Muffin Tree, and I must say this is the prettiest playdough I’ve seen. I’m going to make some right now.
Thank you! so glad you found us here!
In Italy it is called “Dido natural.” I use this recipe http://brucomela.blogspot.com/2010/02/simil-dido.html
Now gurardo also recipes that you mentioned!
thanks Arianna
lovely!
Just tried making this with my three year old son and it’s worked out as a runny liquid!! Where’ve we gone wrong? We used cornflour and half cup of salt and cup of boiling water.
Harry did try adding an oxo stockcube he’d found whilst I came back to computer to check recipe!! But I rescued it out of mix in time!
Haha, I had to laugh at the oxo addition!! Hmmm, I’m at a loss as to what could have gone wrong? Was it definitely corn flour you used? Did you add the cream of tartar and the oil? Those are pretty important too. Sorry it didn’t work! Feel somehow responsible!
Ours is runny liquid too 🙁 My son was so looking forward to this. Maybe your cornstarch is different than what they have in the US?
Oh no!! Ours used corn FLOUR so should be a flour-like powdery substance, Very odd that it became liquid. Did you follow the recipe exactly as above? I wish I could make some for you to have! Sorry it didn;t work, but I know it has done for most people.
Found this on kitchendictionary.com:
“A powdery flour made of finely ground cornmeal, NOT to be confused with cornstarch. The exception is in British and Australian recipes where the term “cornflour” is used synonymously with the U.S. word cornstarch. Corn flour comes in yellow and white and is used for breading and in combination with other flours in baked goods. Corn flour is milled from the whole kernel, while cornstarch is obtained from the endosperm portion of the kernel. Masa Harina is a special corn flour that is the basic ingredient for corn tortillas. White corn flour blends well with other food ingredients and can be blended with wheat flour to reduce gluten for cakes, cookies, pastries and crackers. White corn flour is used as a filler, binder and thickener in cookie, pastry and meat industries.”
Read more: http://www.food.com/library/corn-flour-638#ixzz1lLgcxcQV
We tried to ‘rescue’ it by having fun adding more spoonfuls of cornflour and more salt then Harry LOVED keeping on mixing and mixing! It was still quite tacky as we got it out of the bowl and our attempts at making snowmen were funny as they looked like they were melting as soon as made!!
Harry enjoyed sticking beads and bits into it and he made a car from our ‘off-white!’ dough.
haha, I love that you experimented with it and still had plenty of fun! And I love the take on the melted snowmen, haha. I’m sorry that it didn’t work, really I am!
Made the first batch with hot but not boiling water…bad move on my part. I learned from my mistake and tadaaa….it came out PERFECT. 6 batches later…it’s going to be a fun day at pre-school tomorrow. Thank u so much for a wonderful idea.
We made this today and it was awesome! How do you store yours? Would it be okay in the fridge?
Mine came out runny, too. I’m in the U.S. so I wonder if Corn flour and Corn starch are not equivalent. We saved it by adding flour until it was a nice consistency. It’s wonderful; very silky, not sticky at all (even two weeks later). Thanks!
We also made this and ended up with liquid. I left it to cool as instructed and came back to cool runny liquid lol! I’d followed the recipe faithfully and my daughters were so excited to be making play dough. So I poured it into a saucepan and stirred it for a few minutes over a very low heat – voila! Now we have play dough.
Delightful dough- I made double the batch, heated in a saucepan over a low heat until it congealed- <3 <3 <3 it!
Thank you so much for this great recipe. I am going to make it this morning. 🙂 Just to let you know, you seem to have missed out when to add the glycerine in the method section.
Does anyone know whether this hardens eventually, or could be baked to form ornaments?
From Canada. We are just making up our first batch, but are having the same problem as others above. We used water fresh from a boiled kettle and corn starch, but the playdough was just thick soup. Heating it on the pan really helped save the day! We’ve peppermint scented it for a Christmas present and the kitchen smells great. Thanks for the recipe!
I made this and found that I had to add more corn starch first to reduce stickiness, then I put in the pan on medium and when I kneaded it, I added a bit more. I think you could add food coloring and make a red batch and then green batch. Then put in small containers with small Christmas cookie cutters and pass out as a gift for your children’s friends. 🙂
I just made this today. I doubled the batch and I will say that when I added two cups, it was very runny, but then I ended up using a whole box of corn (16oz) and it was perfect!! We had a great time today with this and can’t wait to pull it out tomorrow to play with again! Ashley-Arizona