Play-doh!

I thought making playdough was easy, oh how wrong I was.  I printed off a recipe from the net and thought great I will just substitute plain flour with GF (gluten free) plain flour. Why did I not think to google a GF playdough recipe.

I get home and set about my way to make what I thought would be a super easy mix. I start well, I get the flour, oil, water, colour - Blue, and salt ready...a cup of salt, What the..? I thought there was meant to be cream of tartar in here somwhere...no recipe doesn't want that.

I follow the recipe and I end up with this bowl of sticky goop. Well thats not what I wanted. I add more flour, it wasn't helping. So I thought wait maybe I need xanthan gum (to replace the gluten), Quick Chris I need reforcements, come help. Out he trotts giving in to my every demand until I decided this just isn't working. My hands, bench, bowl and glass cutting board are covered in this blue goop that is meant to be playdough. At my demand he goes to the study to google "Gluten free playdough recipe". It says boiling water but mine said cold...lets microwave it. Back to the kitchen we go. "Hold the board while I scape it off" "easy don't pull it off the bench", It was like glue. finially we get a good portion of it into the bowl and in the microwave. EWW its drying out. Oh well. Chris goes back to google more. We saw slight improvements after microwaving it but really had little faith we were on a winning track. This is no longer an individual task! I decide it now needs the cream of tartar, I know it should be there, google tells me 4 table spoons. In they go....slight improvement again.... in goes more flour, last of that box. I keep trying to knead it in hope it will come together, it isn't so back in the microwave, this time for longer. Its now hot, all crusty and dried out on the top, but workable. I can knead it. I work the dry bits in and they disappear...wow this isn't too bad. We had managed to rescue what we thought was beyond hope. I did add a little more oil, which ended up everywhere too, oops. The end result is something that quite resembles playdough.

Ingredients:
As Per Recipe
2 cups plain flour
1 cup salt

1 cup cold water

1 tablespoon oil

2 drops of food colour.

Mix dry ingredients, then add wet, wella!

What else I added

~1 cup more of GF flour
4 tablespoons Cream of tartar
1 tablespoon xanthan gum
1 tablespoon oil.
More food colouring, 2 drops didn't give very much colour at all.

The result.
It's quite tough, I wonder if this is the xanthan gum.
It's very grainy, prehaps next time I will desolve salt in boiling hot water 1st.
Its taste is discustingly salty worse than I remember it as a kid (We all know you have to try recipes when you make them :S ), so next time I might use less salt too.
Here it is.

. . . Riley better like playdough!