Gingerbread Play Dough Ornaments
One of our Christmas family traditions is making ornaments. Last year, we experimented with two different gingerbread playdough recipes to make gingerbread ornaments, and I can’t wait to make some again.
The first recipe we tried was purely equal parts applesauce and cinnamon — and despite what some bloggers may say, this is not taste-safe or edible. The amount of cinnamon present can be toxic, so please only use this recipe with children past the “tasting” phase. To make it more “gingerbread-inspired” we added 1 tsp of ginger spice to the dough.
After cutting out the shapes and using a straw to make holes for the string, we baked the ornaments at 350F for 10 minutes. This dough was darker and had a stronger smell, but the dough was very messy and stained our hands and the table!
Our next recipe was more successful, and was a more straight-forward gingerbread play dough:
- 1 cup flour
- 1/2 cup salt
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1 tablespoon oil
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1 tablespoon cream of tartar (optional)
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1 cup boiling water
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1 tablespoon ground ginger
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1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
After playing around, rolling out the play dough, cutting out our desired shapes, and using a straw to make the holes for the string, we left the dough out overnight to dry.
(If you were making these ornaments at a party, you could bake them at 350F for 10 minutes, just make sure the dough is at least a half inch thick.)
We used jute twine to hang the ornaments and give them a rustic edge. I love how they turned out and am so excited to be adding them to our tree for another year.
PS — if you haven’t already, check out our awesome Homemade Play Dough Page.
this was so helpful, is the second recipe more safe to eat if put in the oven and no cream of tarter is added? It probably wouldn’t taste very good without eggs and sugar. But it may not be very harmful
Hi Camille,
While it would be more “safe”, consuming large amounts of cinnamon can be toxic so it still shouldn’t be eaten as a snack but can be safely tasted.