Salt Dough

I love working with salt dough. You can do so much with it, the possibilities are endless. It's easy and inexpensive to make. You probably have the ingredients sitting in your cupboards right now. I like putting food coloring right in the dough. Once baked, the colors come out bright and beautiful. You can also paint it, cover it in glitter, or just leave it as is. This is the kind of baking I excel at. The finished product is supposed to be hard as a rock and tasteless! Here is the recipe I use, although if you search google you'll find a bunch of different variations.

Ingredients
2 cups white flour
1 cup table salt
1 cup water
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl until they form a smooth dough. You can try to mix it with a spoon, but it wont's work. Get your hands in there and get dirty! If the dough seems too runny, gradually add a little more flour. If it's too flaky, gradually add some water. Once you get the dough to a workable consistency, you can either kneed in food coloring or leave it as it. Now you are ready to let your imagination go wild! Sprinkle some flour on your work surface and your cookie sheets to prevent sticking. If you plan to make ornaments, remember to punch a hole in the top with a straw! You can either let them air dry (takes wayyy too long for me) or bake them at 200 degrees until hard. After they are hard, you can paint them, cover them in glitter, or even write on them with sharpies. I like to paint on a coat of Elmer's glue to give them a nice inexpensive shine.

These are some salt dough valentines we made by adding food coloring right to the dough. We used cookie cutters to make the hearts, and sculpted the eyes and mouths by hand. We attached ribbons and wrote a message on the back with a sharpie.

Little hands hard at work!

A glitter covered ornament on the tree.

Ready to go in the oven. (These make great Christmas presents from the kids!)