What's needed for the dough: 1 cup of salt
1 cup of plain flour
1 cup of lukewarm water
Additional tools to make them into something pretty:
Glitter Glue pens
Letterpress kit
Cookie cutters
Gold twine
Straw for making holes for the twine
Baking tray
So it's quite simple really, you just preheat your oven to 90-100 degrees C. They have to dry out slowly, so lower heat - longer time is the trick. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and gradually add the water until you reach a consistency that pulls away from the sides of the bowl and isn't sticky. Once your dough is ready, knead it on a flowered surface - I love doing this :) Then roll in out with your rolling pin. This should be more fun - however I always have too little flour on the pin and it wants to stick, so I keep having to flour it. Another trick is that the pin should be ready cool. I have a marble pin which I find much better than the wooden ones. So roll the dough out til a couple mms thickness and cut your shapes out with cookie cutters. Take your straw and poke a hole, swivel it around to pull the dough out and viola, you have your ornaments ready for the baking!!
I have a letterpress kit which I bought from Yuppiechef (thanks yuppiechef - you're amaze) and so I pressed names into the ornaments I'd like to give as gifts to my family to hang on their tree in future. Just a little something extra that makes my gift a typical "Caryn" gift... They know how much I love to make things. :) But you can use stamps or anything really to make it your own.....
Bake these guys on an ungreased baking tray - they need to dry out, they won't stick - for 3 hours. Once they're done, use your glitter glue to squeeze blobs on the ornaments and smear it around with your fingers til it's nicely even on your ornament. Then when that's dry, thread your twine through and there you have it!
