I'm not trying to turn this into a craft blog. Really. I'm generally not that crafty but in the interest of making Christmas special for Sam, I've been somewhat motivated to try new things, in this case cinnamon dough ornaments.
I found a recipe on-line and it seemed simple enough:
1 1/2 c cinnamon*
1 c applesauce
1/4 c Elmer's glue**
Mix, let it sit, roll it out, cut it, let it dry flipping it over now and then so it doesn't curl up.
But that's really not the way it worked. First off, Sam "helped" me do this and we made some impressive clouds of cinnamon in in the mixing process. It's hard to laugh and cough at the same time. Following the recipe as listed above, the slop had the texture of gritty mud so of course I figured I knew better and added another 3/4 c of cinnamon. That made it too dry so I added more applesauce. Then I figured the glue ratio was off and the only glue I had in the house was glitter glue so I added some of that. Actually, I think that was probably my best decision of the day because glitter = Christmas, particularly glitter you don't have to vacuum out of anyone's hair.
Sam kept asking to lick the beater.
Finally, I had a substance that could be formed into a ball. Sam's 3 year old buddy came over in a tired, unhappy mood and we rolled the dough*** while they cried, fought, and grabbed for cookie cutters in a lovely expression of holiday spirit. We couldn't lift the cut outs off the paper so we peeled the dough from around them instead.
Wait, isn't this supposed to be enjoyable?
The result of our labors are now drying in the kitchen. They aren't dry yet and now have the texture of semidry mudpies. With sparkles. Very appealing. Sam broke three of them this morning and I expect the number that make it to the tree will be zero. I need to find a use for cinnamon pieces.
*Yes, that IS a lot of cinnamon but Beth told me that Big Lots had it for $0.55 a container so I got three of them.
**I recommend that if you're going to make something like this use glue that is not 10+ years old like the stuff I had on hand. Did you know the stuff separates after all that time? I had to cut the bottle in half and scrape out the thick goo. I'm sure this had NOTHING to do with the lack of success of my project.
***I used my pizza dough trick here. I rolled the stuff with parchment paper on the bottom and plastic wrap on the top so I didn't have to worry about it sticking. I didn't want a glue-covered, cinnamon-flavored rolling pin.
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4 comments:
Apple sauce, cinnamon, and glue seems like a pretty runny recipe for ornaments. I wonder if there was also supposed to be a little flour in it??
Can't wait to see the pictures though!
Great story. Back one Christmas, we were so piss poor we had no money for ornaments and made these. We had better luck though, and used them for years! We tied cinnamon sticks with red ribbon too, which smelled really nice.
I laughed my butt off when I read this post. I kept imagining you adding more ingredients to get the right consistancy, only to end up with a batch of dough twice as large as you had planned. And I imagined what kind of face Sam would have made, had you let him lick the beater...lol.
Hmmm...maybe I should try this recipe. Don't know if I could find cinnamon that cheap here though!! Our glue is fresh, but do you think moldy applesauce would work??
ROFL at the moldy applesauce. Mine nearly always gets that way too.
I'm happy to report that the ornaments are exceeding my expectations and appear to be drying hard as a rock. Perhaps we will have smelly cinnamon/glue ornaments with sparkles on our tree after all.
And LisaTV, I like the cinnamon stick idea and may use it as a Sammy project. Thansk for the idea.
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