Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Oatmeal Fun Dough

One rainy day, Tyler (my little play dough lover) and I decided to make something a little different than our usual dough. We have a large canister of oatmeal sitting around that Tyler doesn't care to eat, so when I found a recipe for "Oatmeal Fun Doh" online, we decided to give it a try (be sure to read on...).

Oatmeal Fun Dough
2 cups uncooked oatmeal
1 cup flour
1/4 cup water

Add ingredients, mix and knead. 
From the start, I was skeptical about this recipe. It didn't seem like there would be enough moisture to make much of anything.

Maybe I was just impatient with our kneading and already had the idea in my head that it would require more water, but it didn't seem to work. I added more water...then too much water. I added more flour. Maybe too much flour...

Our dough had an interesting texture that Tyler had to get used to (great for his sensory quirks) but it was also thick and tough rather than the pliable consistency you'd hope for.

Cutting with cutters required help from Mama, as did forming balls and worms.

Our play doh press requires a great deal of effort anyhow, but it was almost too much with this dough.

While the dough wasn't all that workable, we still played with it for about half and hour before throwing it away. I gave Tyler a small amount of water after a while to sprinkle and paint onto the quickly drying dough. That was probably the most fun for him.

After this failure, I researched other oatmeal dough recipes. They often look the same as the one I tried, but with much more water. Almost all of the recipes I found call for: 

1 part flour
1 part water
2 parts oatmeal

Not sure how I lucked out with the bum recipe, but if you try this one, I'd love to hear how it went!

1 comment:

  1. I made oatmeal play dough earlier this week and had the same problem. I think the next time we play with it I will try to knead in some oil and see if that helps.

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