Pumpkin Pie Playdough

Let the pumpkin theme continue!! Since we are eating and drinking everything pumpkin this time of year, we might as well play with pumpkin too! A friend shared one of those Facebook video tutorials that had this recipe ( if you can call it that) on it and I knew I had to try it. It's super easy to make, extremely inexpensive, and who doesn't want it to be okay to play with pumpkin pie!

To make this delicious smelling dough, all you need is pumpkin puree, cornstarch and pumpkin spice! We mixed the cornstarch into the pumpkin puree 1/2 cup at a time until we reached the dough consistency we wanted. It ended up taking 6-7 cups, so I suggest doing it 1 cup at a time. Then we added in the pumpkin spice. To jazz it up a bit, I dug out some sugar leaves that I had in the sprinkle basket and tossed them in too. *TIP - because you need such a large amount of cornstarch I suggest buying it in bulk from a store like Bulk Barn.

Roman lost interest in mixing pretty quickly when I told him he had to mix gently and keep everything in the bowl, so he stuck to scooping and dumping. In hind sight, it probably would have been better to just let him mix however he wanted to. Bianca is currently in the "everything must go in my mouth!!!" stage, so she just watched us from the sidelines. As you can tell from the pictures, she was impressed with me....

Of course the first thing he did was run off to get his construction trucks so that he could "build a construction site". I always cringe when he puts cars with small pieces into dough like this because cleaning them can be a nightmare. Not this time though! I rinsed his tractor under warm water for a few seconds and voila! A squeaky clean tractor!

Roman had a blast playing with the dough! Once he had enough, I stuck it all into a freezer bag and popped it in the fridge. It's been about a week since we made it and the dough is still usable. When it's cold it is pretty crumbly but once you work with it and it warms up a bit, it's back to normal. I don't think I'll hang on to it much longer though because I don't want things to start growing. Oh, and those sugar leaves. Yeah, they basically dissolved. Not surprising since the dough is pretty wet and they are in fact made of sugar.

Have you made any scented dough for your kids to play with, or is there a scent you'd like to see me attempt? Comment below! I'd love to hear your ideas!