Sand Playdoh

My friend Carla shared this link the other day, and Lincoln and I decided to whip up our own batch of sand playdoh one afternoon to test it out.

First, we got Bennett situated in his bouncy chair.  Please ignore the missing plank in our deck.  We replaced our sliding door and had to remove the plank to fit the door in.  It's just a temporary ghetto look.

 Okay, for the playdoh start with 1.5 cups of all purpose flour (note: do NOT use bread flour.  I'll explain later...).

Then, measure out 2 cups of clean sand. (note:  do NOT use wet sand.  I'll explain that later, too...)

Add 1/8 cup vegetable oil to the sand/flour mix and stir together.

Pour in 1/2 cup of water, and continue mixing.  You'll need to mix by hand when it becomes too difficult to stir. (note:  please notice how the cup is in focus and lincoln is blurry in the photo below.  thank you, awesome new camera).

At this point, you should be done, but if you are like us (don't be like us!), you may be staring at a bowl of sand soup.  Our mistake was using wet sand, then adding water and oil to it and expecting it to produce a dry dough.  I have a newborn baby and haven't been sleeping much, and I will use that as my excuse for every mistake I make for at least the next 6 months.  ANYway, due to the wetness of the sand, we had to add an additional 2 cups of flour.  That is a lot of extra flour that could have been used in my kitchen for actual baking.

After wasting mixing in all that extra flour, we finally had something resembling playdoh!  Please note that we only made a half version of the original recipe...and it made a ton of playdoh (even before the extra flour...).  The texture is really gritty (obviously), so we played with it outdoors to prevent scratching the table surface indoors.  Not sure if it actually would scratch the surface, but better safe than sorry!

Lincoln had a good time playing with the sand playdoh.  When he was done, I just put it into a ziplock bag to save for another day.  Then we checked on Baby Bennett.

He was getting squirmy.

Now, if you recall, I issued a warning above to avoid using bread flour in your playdoh.  I am not sure if using bread flour was our downfall, or if it came down again to using wet sand, but either way...our sand playdoh turned into a goopy, yeast bread dough type bubbly mess overnight.  I was scared to open the bag, so I threw it directly into the trash.  It looked like that friendship bread starter that gets passed around from time to time...and playdoh should not look that way.  So, if you have to use bread flour, just make sure your sand is dry.

Repeat after me:  USE DRY SAND.

That's all--2 posts down!