Home Baked Christmas Decorations
You can put your oven to good use helping you get ready for the holiday season long before it’s time to start baking cakes, pies, and casseroles for your family’s Christmas dinner by baking (that’s right, baking!) your own Christmas ornaments.
About Making Home Baked Christmas Decorations
Rather than rushing to the arts and crafts store and spending your hard-earned money on supplies to create homemade holiday decorations, why not use items and equipment that you already have?
You can use a few supplies that you probably already have in your pantry and your oven to create your own “home baked” Christmas ornaments. This activity is a great way to spend time with your family while creating beautiful – and frugal – holiday decorations for your home or to use as gifts.
Instructions for Making Home Baked Christmas Ornaments
How to Make Ornament Dough
Keep in mind that you’re making Christmas decorations to display, not snacks to eat. The dough that you make for this craft activity won’t taste good – after all, you’re not baking cookies to eat. If you start with dough that tastes good to you, it’ll also taste good to insects and other pests.
Mixing the Dough
The best dough option for home baked Christmas ornaments is made with nothing more than flour, salt and hot water. Simply place the following ingredients into a bowl and mix until thoroughly combined: 4 cups of flour, 1 cup of salt and 1 ½ cups of hot water. When you’re finished mixing, the dough will have the appearance (but not the taste!) of cookie dough.
Color Options
If you want to change the color of the dough, simply add food coloring to get the shades you desire. Add color a few drops at a time and mix thoroughly before adding more so that you can maintain control of the shade. You may want to separate the finished dough into separate bowls and create small batches of different color dough that can be combined to make creative, colorful ornaments.
Taking Shape
Once the dough is mixed and is the color you want, simply mold it into the shapes that you prefer. You can form the dough into balls, or roll it into strips that can be shaped into candy canes. Alternately, you may want to flatten it with a rolling pin and cut into appropriate shapes with holiday themed or round cookie cutters.
Baking Your Creations
It’s best to bake dough ornaments at a very low temperature for a long period of time. Preheat the oven to one hundred degrees. While the oven is heating, place a loop of wire or an ornament hook in the back or top of each ornament. Next, place each shape face up on a cookie sheet that has been lined with wax paper. Bake for approximately three hours and allow them to cool. The finished ornaments should have a hard, dry consistency.
Decorating Your Ornaments
When your home baked ornaments have cooled, you and your family members can finish them off using your stockpile of arts and crafts supplies. Use glue, glitter and pain to embellish your collection of home baked Christmas ornament decorations in unique ways. You’ll only be limited by your imagination – and the quantity of decoration supplies that you have on hand!
