A great project to do with kids is to create cookie dough Christmas ornaments from a salt dough recipe. Kids love rolling out the cookie dough, cutting shapes with assorted cookie cutters and then adding the final touch of decorating!
It's a messy, but fun project that can be quite time consuming, so its best to create the cookies one day or weekend......then decorate the next.
Be sure to have your camera handy for those great keepsake photos.
Ornament Dough
3 cups all-purpose (plain) flour
3/4 cup salt
3/4 teaspoon powdered alum
1 1/4 cups water
In large mixing bowl, combine flour, salt and alum. mix well. Add water.Mix well and shape dough into ball.
Knead dough on lightly floured surface for about 5 min or until smooth. If dough is too stiff, sprinkle with water; if too moist, add flour. Work with small portions at a time. Store excess dough in airtight container.
Roll dough on lightly floured surface to about 1/4" thickness.
Dip edges of cutters into vegetable oil and cut into desired shapes. Use a drinking straw to make a hole about 1/4 from the top edge of the cutouts for hanging.
Yields about 40 2 1/2" to 3" ornaments or 24 3 1/2" to 4" ornaments. To connect pieces of dough, moisten with a water dipped paintbrush.
Spray a 10 pie plate with vegetable cooking spray. Place ornaments in a prepared pan.
Microwave at 30% or medium low for about 5-10 min or until the tops feel dry, rotating plate and checking ornament every 2 min. (Sometimes I place an identical size pie plate on top of the cookies to help keep them flat during baking.)
Remove ornament to cooling rack, set aside for 24 hrs to complete drying. Paint with water colors or acrylic paints. Glitter paints in tubes work well. You can also coat your ornaments with a coat of clear spray paint once you're done decorating to give more shine.
Takes lots of pictures of your treasures being made))
Decorating Cookies
Brush off any excess or loose crumbs. Since the shapes we had on this occasion were only gingerbread men, I took a brown acrylic pain and painted both sides of the cookies. Then using glitter paint in small bottles, the kids decorated the cookies. We did them outside and protected the table with cardboard. We used pieces of red ribbon for ties.
