With a cold howling wind blowing, a bit of a hangover and Northern Dad away carousing with his mates for the weekend, it was time for some quiet indoor crafts this weekend.
As regular readers will know, we have done playdough a lot in the last cold, wet and windy weeks, and I fancied a change. (In our house, a change really means I fancy picking up a slightly different colour and consistency of mess off the floor)
So we took inspiration from a friend and decided to combine our love of baking, getting floury and imagination play. Both Big Boy and Littlest Angel love, love, love playing shops, bakeries, restaurants, so we decided to make some salt dough breads to play with.
We put our pinnies on, rolled up our sleeves and got ready to make up a big batch of saltdough ‘bread’.
Now, I’ll be honest, making this was a messy old business. At one stage, you could barely see across the kitchen counter as the clouds of flour were so thick. It was like a big white sandstorm inside our house.
And we had an epic Pinny Fail. Both Littlest Angel and Big Boy were covered head to toe in flour, apart from the outline of their protective pinny on their fronts. But they were laughing through the clouds, and that’s what counts, right?
Recipe
2 cups of flour
1 cup of fine salt
About 1 1/4 cups of warm water
Method
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
Line a baking tray or two with greaseproof paper.
In a large bowl, mix the flour and fine salt.
Add the warm water, a little at a time. You probably won’t need all the water as you don’t want it to be too sticky.
Give it all a good knead to make sure it’s all mixed in. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface.
Divide into little portions and have fun making breads, buns, cakes and little pastries.
Bake in the oven for around 30 minutes. If they’re really tiny, they won’t take as long as this so check after 20 minutes.
To make them even prettier, you can actually paint these when they’re cold. But Littlest Angel was desperate to set up her bakery, so we’ll probably never get around to that!
So far, these have been sold in the play shop, served up in a play restaurant, lined up and counted out and ferried around the house in a basket by ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. I suspect we’ll get a lot of play out of these.
In fact, they were so popular that a selection were taken to school today for ‘Show and Tell’.
