Winter is here and everyone is starting to climb the walls. One way to carpe diem is making a gingerbread bakery with your kids.

One snowy day, I surprised the kids with an invitation to play. Sitting on the table when they came downstairs was a mixing bowl full of brown homemade gingerbread play dough, a variety of winter cookie cutters, and a bunch of scraps of craft supplies that I dug out of the bottom of our craft box.

I invited the kids to pretend that they were bakers and that our task for the day was to bake delicious, creative cookies.

I think they did a great job of rolling out the dough, cutting out the cookies, and decorating their creations!  

Ingredients 

• 1 cup of flour
• 1/2 cup of salt
• 1 Tb cinnamon
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 2-3 Tb vegetable oil
• 1 cup of water

Directions 

Put all of the dry ingredients in a pot on the stove, stir, and then add the wet ingredients. Begin to heat on the stovetop over low-medium heat, stirring constantly. Before long, your dough will begin getting thick, then clumpy, then pulling away from the pan. When it’s not sticky anymore, take it out of the pan and let it cool for a couple minutes. Knead it a few times, and ta-da! You have some wonderfully delicious smelling playdoh that will make your whole house smell like gingerbread!

After the kids decorated their cookies, we put them on baking sheets and popped them into a NON-HEATED oven  (just pretend!). They thought that this was FANTASTIC because they are never allowed near the oven.

 

Of course, you could always make an oven out of cardboard if you wanted, and they could play with it for days!

After done with your playdoh, you can put it in a airtight container and use it for up to 3-4 months (maybe another month if you refrigerate it!). If it gets a bit dry, you can always add a bit of vegetable oil.

Have fun “baking”!