Painted Salt Dough Fruit gluten-free, homemade, playdough

For the girls' birthdays they used their money to buy this book called, Green Crafts for Children. I could just eat this book up. It's so pretty that in the week we've had it, the girls and I can't stop looking at it. We want to do everything, but these Salt Dough Fruit are our second project from the book, following the Cork Animals (so cute!). The recipe in the book called for wheat flour, but I substituted with cornstarch. Rather than use all my nice sea salt in clay, I also went out and bought some salt for less than a dollar—salt that I wouldn't feed my family :-)

Gluten-free Salt Dough:

Bring to barely a boil:

1 cup of water

Add 1 cup of salt

stir and dissolve for about a minute

(I couldn't get all of the salt to dissolve)

Pour salt and water over 1 cup of cornstarch

Mix together

Add 1/4 cup of cold water

2 tbsp oil

Mix and kneed the clay like dough

If the dough is too wet and sticky, add more corn starch till it has a playdough consistency.

Sculpt into fruit shapes.

Use wet hands and dip chunks of clay in water as needed to keep it smooth.

Bake at 200 degrees. These took about 3 hours to dry all the way through, because the pieces were thick. Thin pieces would take much less time.

We used acrylic paint and I sealed the fruit outside with Glossy Mod Podge.

Note: I poked the top of the strawberries with a toothpick before baking, to have a place to stuff the felt stem. I cut the felt leaves in a star shape, following the pictures in the book. Then I made a slit in the middle of the star and pushed the stem through. I also used a toothpick to push the stem into the hole with glue after they were painted and sealed.