One weekend a few weeks ago, Mr Moo and my mum (Uber Granny) donned their aprons and made some home made play dough. I’m not sure what made Uber Granny think of it or where she found the recipe but it was an enormous hit (and,as it happens, not just with Mr Moo!).
Together they just had so much fun making it and then playing with it. They used various kitchen implements to cut, mould and shape the dough, everything from pastry cutters to a garlic press. They even unearthed a kitchen implement which none of us recognised but which was just perfect for making a horse’s mane (we found out later that the implement in question was for cutting herbs but had never worked – it is now the official mane shaper!).
The fun was contagious as one minute the rest of us were pottering round the house doing mundane things like drying dishes and folding laundry, the next we were all hovering around the kitchen table admiring Mr Moo’s elephant which, we all agreed, was in the cubist style, and Uber Granny’s modernist take on a giraffe.
Five minutes later we were all tapping into our artistic side and using blobs of dough to mould all kinds of creations. We quickly remembered why we’d loved this stuff so much as children. I’m ashamed to admit that at one point, Mr McSpendy and I got really competitive and started a mini-contest to see which of us could make the most creations that Mr Moo could correctly identify. There was much laughter as Mr Moo would shout out ‘its a hippo’, ‘a bicycle’, ‘a whale’ etc and we would be forced to admit that it was actually ‘a cat’, ‘a train’, ‘a lizard’ etc!’. I’m not sure who ultimately won the game but it’s safe to say that neither of us missed our calling as sculptors!
Anyway, if you feel like going down memory lane and having some old school fun, here is the recipe:
2 cups flour
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup salt
Optional: Food colouring – a few drops totally transforms your play dough.
You can store the mixtue in an airtight bag in the fridge until your next artistic outburst.
