available fall 2008
This toy had Nutmeg dancing around with joy as we opened the box. I was rather joyful myself, since the Cubs were about to start the playoffs and I was counting on the Ice Cream Shoppe to keep both girls occupied until dinner.
Before I could leave them to it, there was some assembly, but it was nothing. All I had to do was snap two long pieces of plastic into the main frame. One was the sprinkle maker, the other the topping maker.
The girls played happily with the set for 35 minutes, and I even got in on the act, spurred on by happy memories of my Play-Doh beauty parlor set. After that, Pebbles got frustrated and started crying -- probably a combination of the late hour, the toy being beyond her capabilities (it's aimed at kids 3 and up), and, most of all, her sister not sharing.
Speaking of the 3-and-up thing, you'd think that very young kids would get confused when Play-Doh is used to make pretend food. But Pebbles got the idea right away and I don't think she ate any.
Here's what we love:
1) Any new Play-Doh set is a good thing. We love Play-Doh, and that satisfying feeling that comes from pushing it through some kind of crank or mold.
2) Although I wish the kids would spend more time with just Play-Doh or clay, using their imagination instead of molds, this set at least gives them a lot of options. For instance, all the little molds of flowers and fruit built into the set provide for various decorating strategies. Also, a new Play-Doh set helps get Nutmeg excited about playing with her Play-Doh in general, and it had been just sitting around lately.
3) It's not character licensed or especially gender-themed. We have a My Little Pony beauty parlor set, but I'm not too quick to get that one out.
4) It comes with a tub of Play-Doh that is specially multicolored for making sprinkles. Nutmeg loves sprinkles.
5) Our set came with a coupon for $2 off a $10 Play-Doh purchase. I love coupons.
What we didn't love:
1) When you crank out soft serve ice cream, the cone rotates and it's supposed to fall into the cone in a nice twist like it would from a real soft serve machine. In reality, it doesn't coil very easily. Maybe we'll get better at this, but so far we've had to manually retwist it and then the ridges have little finger marks on them.
2) It's kind of hard to get the sprinkles maker to make individual sprinkles. You have to put in Play-Doh, then clamp down the top and crank it. But you have to put in a very small amount of Play-Doh to allow the top to clamp down and start cranking.
3) When you are trying to clamp down the sprinkles maker, if you use any force at all it's easy to to tip over the whole set, which is quite light. So if you have one dish sitting on a platform or a cake on the cake pedestal, and you're trying to do sprinkles, everything will go flying.
4) Some of the parts are difficult to get the dough off of because they don't all come apart once they're snapped together.
Here are our creations. They never look quite like they do in the ads, do they? I wonder how many "professional Play-Doh modelers Hasbro employs to make the perfect creations featured on the boxes?
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