So, yep, I had a crack at making some cornflour dough to make some tags/decorations and as usual in my life anything to do with following a recipe almost always ends up in either a large scale disaster or a smaller scale catastrophe... this trial was no exception! Haha! To start off with, this extremely simple one step, one pot recipe turned into a a major panic-driven two pot escapade when I inadvertently managed to confuse baking soda with baking powder and ended up with a seething, bubbling, mass on a scale with Vesuvius erupting - the overspill of which had to be poured into another large pot which meant I had to look after/cook two at the same time. Eeek! The recipe didn't give any warning to expect this! I'd followed the very simple, in fact I would say foolproof instructions to add baking soda to cornflour and water only to discover at my peril that baking soda and baking powder are NOT THE SAME THING! Now can I say in my defence I am Scottish and here we have Baking Powder or Bicarbonate of Soda to choose from when baking and so I just assumed that the Baking Soda referred to in the American recipe would be known as Baking Powder here. WRONG! Lol! Fortunately after quite a bit of boiling and stirring two pots at once, I ended up with a very similar sparkly dough that rolled out well that achieved the same results - it just didn't look quite as snowy white and dried a bit coarser looking. Oh, and for goodness sake it made squillions of tags in fact way too many which is why Millie ended up with a load of them to sell at the School Fair. Not one to be put off by such experiences - hey I take mini disasters in my stride - I decided to give the whole thing another whirl and try making them properly using THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS and a bit less of them. Result! This turned out exactly the way it was intended to! Yippee! Lovely and sparkly, snowy white, smooth dough albeit a bit harder to roll out and softer to work. This time I got a more manageable amount to work with and so in future will stick with my own proportions of ingredients.
Here's my recipe...
1 cup of bicarbonate of soda
1/2 cup of cornflour
1/2 cold water
Heat together on cooker, stirring till it boils.
The mixture will thicken so keep stirring and it will turn into a dough (hopefully, hahaha!)
Let this cool and then you can roll it out. I used some festive cookie cutters to cut out the shapes. You can also use stamps to add a bit of texture - fabric doilies rolled over the dough add a lovely texture and glitter can be added in there too, but I wanted mine mainly plain so I could stamp names on them once dry. Mine dried in a couple of days as the room they were in was nice and warm - we had the coal fire on and I positioned them nearby to dry slowly but gently. I'm sure they would be fine by a radiator or something similar, just make sure they don't dry too quickly or they might crack.
Here's a couple of piccies of the results and how they look stamped both as a texture and stamped with ink. I've used mine as little tags on my wrapped up parcels but they would look lovely as pretty, rustic decorations hung on a Christmas tree too...
Why not have a try at making them - after all, I make all the mistakes so you don't have to...heehee! That should be my mission statement in life!!!
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| The top samples are the wrong ones made with baking soda and the bottom row samples are the bicarb soda ones! |
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| You can see that these ones don't take the stamping quite so well as they have a courser texture. They definitely have a pretty sparkle but have an off white colour to them! |
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| This is a sample made with the right ingredients and as you can see it embosses really well with a stamp. As the tags dry the embossing deepens and sharpens up. These ones are beautifully snowy white but aren't quite as sparkly the baking powder ones. |
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| Here they embellishing some parcels. |
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| Here they are stamped... |
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| ...and they can be written on too as they are nice and smooth! |
Have a lovely Merry Christmas everyone - I know you will all be very busy in these last days leading up to the big day so thankyou very much for taking the time to visit me here! I appreciate it so much!
Best wishes,
Jak
xxx
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