It is time! Time for decorations and delicious scents and fun! Yes, it’s time to make cinnamon ornaments!
There are several different recipes floating around on the web, but since I’ve had issues in the past with children taking bites out of these, I like to use only edible ingredients:
Cinnamon and applesauce. To make ornaments, start with equal parts applesauce and cinnamon. (We used 1 cup of each.) Your dough will probably be sticky; begin adding cinnamon like it was flour until it reaches a rollable consistency – pliable but not very sticky.
Sprinkle some cinnamon on a clean dry surface to keep the dough from sticking to it; you can add more cinnamon any time things start to get sticky. Roll out your dough between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick – any thinner than that and your ornaments will be extra fragile, any thicker and it will be hard to dry it enough.
You can use a drinking straw to make a nice round hole in the top.
When you’re ready to bake your ornaments, set your oven to 200F and bake them for about 2 1/2 hours. You can also dry them on a wire rack for 2 or 3 days, but that’s a long time to trust that my children won’t stick their fingers in something.
Once they’re done drying (and cool) stick some ribbon through the hole. Ta-da! You have ornaments that were fun to make and will scent your house all month. I actually have some that are more than four years old that are still intact, and they still smell great. We make more almost every year though, because some break (or get eaten) and they make great little gifts to give away to friends and neighbors.
