Homemade Play Doh

This is a great opportunity to introduce measuring and the color wheel to your children - they can help add the food coloring to discover how colors mix!

Homemade Play Dough

makes about 2.5 Cups

1 1/2 cups of flour
3/4 cups of salt
1 1/2 cups water
1 TB vegetable oil
1/2 TB cream of tarter
*food coloring - I use the liquid kind

Mix all of the ingredients into a saucepan. Add the food coloring to your liking. - Children can help with this step

Adults only -
Set your stove top to medium-low (about a 2.5 on a glass top stove). Stand by the pan and stir occasionally. When the batter look is gone and the ingredients start staying together when you stir (5-8 minutes), remove the pan from the heat. Lay out some wax paper and scoop play dough onto the wax paper. I can usually start kneading right away, but make sure that you check the dough for heat - you don't want to burn yourself!
Once the dough has been kneaded into a nice texture, place in an airtight container or zip lock. The snack sized zip locks work beautifully.

Thanks so much to An Art Nest for this picture and recipe!

Cake Pop Basket

The next time you are going to a party or BBQ, why not bring an edible bouquet of cake pops?  They are super easy to make, look pretty and taste delicious!

All you need is a cute basket and a foam circle (you can find in a craft store or dollar store), some crinkled paper and your cake pops!

Directions on how to make cake pops can be found here in an earlier post on my blog:

cake pops

The directions tell you how to make Angry Bird cake pops, but you would just need to change up the decorating part - you can do as I did above and dip your cake pops into melted white chocolate wafers and then dip into colorful sprinkles!  YUM!

To finish off the basket you could always wrap in cellophane and put a pretty bow!  What a great gift to let someone know you are thinking of them!

Great way to reuse glass containers!

Don't throw away those empty pickle jars and salsa jars!  Instead, wash them super well, or stick them in your dishwasher and reuse them!  A great idea shown here is to reuse various shapes/sizes of glass jars for an Ice Cream Party.  Each glass container can hold a different yummy topping to add to your ice cream sundae!  To make them look even prettier, you can add labels and cute stickers, ribbon.  Basically you can get as creative as you would like to with this!  Special thanks to my cousin April for this fantastic idea!