Blackberry Playdough - Autumn Blog Hop

It's Autumn time and we're doing some fun Autumn activities at the moment enjoying the last weeks of warmth before Autumn closes in completely and one of the things we have done is collecting Blackberries from the bushes in the local park and woods. Our first foraging activity was a little bit of a disaster in the fact that we collected very few blackberries not enough to make anything with so instead I took it as an opportunity to make some blackberry playdough with J and T using our favourite playdough recipe to make at home.

Making Blackberry Playdough with fresh blackberries

When we got home I set up a messy mat on the floor in case my idea of squashing the blackberries to get out the juice wasn't as Mess-Free as I envisaged. Then I placed the blackberries in a ziplock bag and gave J my rolling pin and he rolled the bag squishing and squashing all of the blackberries and getting the juice from the berries.

T tried to help with the squashing but J was in charge and she was allowed to have a go at the end. Once the blackberries were thoroughly squashed I added a little water to the bag and J and T shook it like mad mixing up the blackberries and water to get as much juice out as possibly.

Using a muslin cloth we poured the juice into it and into a bowl and then had a lot of fun squeezing the cloth to get as much of the juice out as possible.

I always use the same playdough recipe which uses hot water - so instead of heating the water, I put the blackberry juice in the microwave until it was boiling and used that instead.

J helped me measure out the other ingredients and then we needed the dough to get it just perfect to play with together.

We then played with the playdough using cookies cutters making blackberry pretend cookies.

Author

Cerys Parker

Cerys is a marine biologist, environmental educator, high school teacher and mum. Realising that life doesn't have to be put on hold and you don't just have to survive whilst the kids are young she shares ideas to inspire you to LIVE with the kids, with activities to do together, recipes to cook and enjoy and family travel to make memories to last a lifetime.