Let's Eat Playdough!

My kids love their new little station in the kitchen--"It's so much fun to work on our projects in the kitchen with you, Mom!"  Mostly they've been rolling out playdough cookies and "baking" them in the old refrigerator we have in one corner of our kitchen (when it's not being used as an oven, the old fridge also makes a handy truck to bring all their things home from town in--such as the chocolate pie they had to pick up from Food Lion "on the way home" today). 

This morning, I thought it was time to make them some playdough they could actually make edible cookies out of.  I remember playing with this stuff as a kid, and of course eating most of it.  The original recipe came from Esther Shank's "Mennonite Country-Style Recipes" cookbook (which has an easy salt dough recipe on the same page--653.)  I halved and modified it as seen below. 

Chocolate Peanut Butter Playdough

1/4 cup peanut butter

2 TBSP syrup (or honey)

1/4 cup instant dry milk powder

1 TBSP cocoa powder*

1 TBSP powdered sugar

water and all-purpose flour to correct texture as needed

Mix first 5 ingredients thoroughly in a bowl.  Knead and correct texture with small amounts of water and/or flour as needed to get a soft, pliable dough.  Different peanut butters will affect the texture differently.  My dough started out pretty crumbly, but got nice and soft with the addition of about a TBSP of water and a few TBSP of flour.

*The original recipe only calls for powdered sugar, but I used some cocoa powder because it's (a little) more nutritious and we like chocolate!

 See the "oven" in the background?

Making a chocolate pie (the same one that got picked up from Food Lion

later on).  Just overheard:  "Don't touch the pie to the baby's mouth 

because she's too little to have chocolate.  She's only one month old."  

Fresh from the oven.  Do not ask this girl to pose.  Trust me.

Roll, pinch, press, cut, "bake", decorate (we used raisins and nuts), and enjoy!  I gave my kids a little bowl of flour to keep the dough from sticking, and I think they had as much fun sprinkling that around as anything else!  You can see how well-floured their cookies are in the picture above.