Cinnamon Ornaments

The holiday season is in full swing and my Christmas spirit is unstoppable lately! Growing up I was always partial to the christmas ornaments on our tree that were homemade and frankly a bit ratty looking; you just can't buy that type of nostalgia in a store. There was this one ornament in particular, made from a cinnamon dough and shaped like a cow that always intrigued me. This year I stumbled upon a recipe (thanks Martha Stewart!) for cinnamon ornaments and knew I would be testing them out. 

Supplies:

Cinnamon

Applesauce

Glue

Glitter

Ribbon

Stencil or cookie cutter

So as you can see, I had tested out a few tree ideas in my sketchbook and settled on the one in the middle with the bubble around it. I had initially thought I would just draw the design out bigger on a piece of cardboard but the shape just didn't have the same feel to it as the sketch did.

Luckily I have an all-in-one printer that I used to copy and enlarge my sketch so I didn't have to keep trying to recreate it. 

I knew the sketch would leave the limbs of the tree a little too flimsy to work with this type of dough, so I traced the tree a little bit fatter than my sketch.

Using my trusty utility knife, I cut out my stencil. Now this project would have gone probably five times faster if I had just used a cookie cutter, but surprisingly I couldn't find cookie cutters anywhere that I was in love it. 

I went to the dollar store for the cinnamon and applesauce - I figured quality was not top priority for this dough and didn't want to use up our cinnamon supply so soon before Christmas.

Here is what the dough looked like. First you add the cinnamon and applesauce together then mix in the glue. I found that the dough was still too dry and crumbly at that point and was adding water little by little until it was a rollable consistency. 

The stencil tracing was the most time consuming part, but look at how cute those little babies are!

All ready for the oven!

Can't forget to make holes to string them from. Martha used a straw to poke holes, but that was too big for these ornaments, so I just used a toothpick and widened a hole.

So the recipe calls for baking them for 2 hours at 200 degrees, flipping once halfway through. At this point I realized the ornaments were sticking pretty badly to the wax paper. Luckily I had another hour while they finished cooking to come up with an idea to fix them.

Once they were cooled down, I painted the sides with the paper stuck to them white and you would never know that they had a little mess up. In the future I would definitely sprinkle a layer of cinnamon down on the wax paper before baking to try to combat the sticking.

Ready for trimming! I just used some glue and glitter to make the limbs look a little snowy.

Stringing them up looked like it was going to be a bit of a task; the holes were small and the ribbon was fraying at the end. My solution was to tape the end of the ribbon and stick all of them on at once and just cut the ribbon down for each one from there. 

Happy Holidays everyone!

--Heather