Growing up, one of my favorite aunts always included an ornament on our Christmas gift each year. As an adult, I have borrowed this tradition and try each year to come up with a pretty ornament for all of the kids gift. Most of the time I just buy ornaments, but every few years I will catch the crafty bug and make them myself. Salt dough is a fun, cheap, and easy way to make ornaments. This year I wanted to make a Gingerbread House as the ornament so I decided to make a dough that also looks like Gingerbread.
INGREDIENTS
Salt – 1 cup
All Purpose Flour 4 – cups
Cinnamon ¼ cup
Water – 2 cups
Cookie Cutters of Choice
Drinking Straw
Paint and ribbon or string
DIRECTIONS
Mix all dry ingredients.
Add water, and mix into a ball, if dough is too sticky add a few more spoonfuls of flour.
Spread a couple pinches of flour on your countertop, roll the dough out, and cut into the shape of your choice. Place on an ungreased cookie sheets. Take a straw and poke a hole in the ornament in a place that a ribbon would go through, blow the dough out of the straw between each ornament so you can reuse it.
Preheat oven to 300 degrees and bake the ornaments for one hour.
Helpful Tips: Do not fill cookie sheets with more ornaments while your waiting for others to come out of the oven, they will stick like cement to the pan and will break during removal. Wait until right before they are going into the oven to roll the ornaments out and put on the cookie sheet.
Remove the ornaments from the pan immediately after they are baked, cool on cookie rack or foil sheets on the counter.
Don’t put the pan on the bottom rack of the oven, they will burn.
Paint the ornaments any way you choose, the last time I made these I put a clear coat on them after, but since these smelled like cinnamon I didn’t want to coat them so they would still smell. Put a ribbon through the hole and tie it in a loop or bow and your ready to go.
These ornaments last for years. I hope you and your family enjoy.
Written by Kara Cody
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