Salt dough Mermaid or Pirate Treasure

For our Under the Sea Day a few weeks ago we made some simple salt dough coins that I called Mermaid or Pirate treasure, depending on what game was currently being played. It was so easy, and has been so popular with the children, that I thought I'd write it up as a separate post.

My salt dough recipe uses two cups of plain flour, one cup of salt and one cup of water, added slowly to mix to a dough. Roll out the dough and cut into small circles. Then you can make imprints in the dough to add a bit of texture - we used coins and cocktail sticks but anything that would make a strong imprint would work well.

Bake the coins in the oven on a baking tray. I cooked them for about as long as I'd cook biscuits - at 180C for about 10-15 minutes. If they are still soggy in the middle I find that leaving them on a hot radiator for a couple of hours works well to dry them out thoroughly.

Then paint with poster or acrylic paint. We used a mixture of yellow, red and brown paints for coin colours, if you had metallic paints then they would work really well. Then when they were dry we finished off with a coat of some gold glittery paint.

We have used these salt dough coins for lots of role playing games. They've been hidden around the house, collected together in various treasure chest receptacles, and used for buying things in a pretend shop. They also turned out to look like pretty good biscuits, so they've been in and out the play kitchen too!

We do like our pirate crafts - here's how to make our pirate map and pirate treasure chest and gold doubloons.