Valentine’s Day Craft: Simple Scented Play Dough Favours

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, my daughter and I have been working on some simple treats for her to hand out to her friends. Perhaps they're not treats in the traditional sense as they're not at all edible, but I don't think that makes them any less fun! In fact, we most often try to stay away from edible treats as many of her little friends have dietary restrictions and kids tend to get a lot of sweets on special occasions as it is. That led us to this year's Valentine's favours: homemade berry-scented play dough in heart-shaped cookie cutters!

First off, we started by making our play dough. We love this recipe as it requires no cooking and the resulting dough is soft, scented and colourful. Plus it's easy enough for kids to help out with too.

Homemade Berry-Scented Play Dough

This recipe makes enough dough to fill 3 large cookie cutters, or around 6 medium-sized ones.

• 1 cup of all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup of table salt
• 1 packet of berry-flavoured Jell-O (both the regular and sugar-free varieties will work)
• 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar
• 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil
• a few drops of glycerin (optional, but recommended for extra stretch and shine)
• 3/4 of a cup of boiling water

Place all dry ingredients in a large bowl and whisk. Add wet ingredients and mix. Allow the dough to cool for about 10 minutes, then knead really well until the dough is soft and smooth.

With our play dough ready, we gathered a few items to assemble our favours.

You Will Need:

• small plastic gift bags
• heart-shaped cookie cutters (thicker ones are best)
• small rubber bands 
• string or baker's twine
• paper heart cutouts
• a hole punch
• pen

Instructions:

1. First up, we flattened our ball of play dough so it was just slightly thicker than our cookie cutters. You can use a rolling pin for this part if you want, but we usually just flatten it with our hands, then flip the dough over so that the top side is nice and smooth. Then, my little one sunk our cookie cutters down into the dough.

2. When done, the cookie cutters should be completely filled with play dough, but if not, simply try again leaving the dough thicker this time around.

3. To finish off our favours, we slipped the dough-filled cookie cutters into our plastic gift bags and used our rubber bands to seal the tops tightly. I wrote 'Happy Valentine's Day!' on the fronts of our paper hearts, and my little one signed her name on the backs before we punched holes in the corners and tied them on using our red, pink, and white baker's twine.That's it!  Simple favours that are easy and inexpensive to make and fun to give! 

This story was originally published in February 2014, and it was updated with video January 2019.