Salt dough

People have been making fancy loaves of bread for more than 3,000 years. Such elaborate works of "bread art" did not get eaten. Really fine examples were left uneaten and became rock hard. These special exhibits were kept for a long time and brought out for special occasions.

Be it a birth, wedding, an anniversary or the opening of a new business - a work of salt-dough art is a highly personal and individual gift for any occasion, offering decades of joy if handled properly.

Exactly when the amount of salt in the dough was deliberately increased to such an extent that the baked product could no longer be consumed but instead would remain preserved, nobody knows. Today, salt-dough art is one of the most popular handicraft ideas; and not just at Easter, a particularly fun time for children.
With salt dough you can mould various little figures, make items of jewellery or create hand and foot prints.
Not for eating, but for giving - think of something nice!

Instructions:
You will need:

2 cups of flour
2 cups of salt
1 cup of water
1 teaspoon of oil
1-2 dessert spoons of wallpaper paste dissolved in water

Knead all ingredients in a bowl to form a firm dough. If it is a little too dry, add a bit more water. If you want to make art objects with colourful salt dough, simply add a bit of food colouring. Get kneading, rolling, shaping, crafting! You can even use a paper template: simply lay out on the rolled dough and follow the outlines with a pastry wheel or knife. Before baking, the dough has to be left to dry thoroughly at room temperature: a whole day, in other words! Next, pre-heat the oven to 50°C. Next, depending on the thickness, bake the salt dough in the preheated oven for one or two hours. After that, bake for around 1 hour at 100 degrees and 1 hour at 150 degrees! The thicker your figures or shapes, the longer you have to wait. Once they have cooled, you can paint them in different colours. Many edding markers are great for colouring: the edding paint markers work best with their opaque, shiny paint. The edding deco markers also make salt-dough figures into wonderfully colourful objects at the flick of a wrist!

Have fun!