How to make salt dough decorations
Making salt dough ornaments can be a frugal and environmentally friendly way to have fun with the whole family! Yasmin and I make them every year for fun and hang them on our Christmas tree. We have also made some egg shaped decorations for easter. Why not make some as a gift for family and friends too? All you need to make the salt dough decorations are some cookie cutters (we sometimes use my daughters Play-Doh shape cutters), water, salt and flour, but I always add 1-2 tablespoons of cinnamon or few drops of orange & ginger essential oils to make them scented. As you can tell I love the festive smells!
How to make salt dough:
- Mix 4 cups of water, 1 cup of salt and 1.5 cups of water in a mixing bowl. Optionally add 1-2 tablespoons full of cinnamon or 5-10 drops of essential oil of your choice to the mixture. Please do note that the more cinnamon you add, the browner the dough looks. the dough to have some colour, as they look like real cookies but are just decorations.I personally use DoTerra essential oils, when I do add oils, as these are Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade (CPTG) oils.
- Optionally preheat the oven to 100 degrees Celcius. If you would like to save a little money, you can also air dry it but, this can take several days.
- Knead the mixture for approximately 10 minutes. Since I use my Kitchenaid stand mixer, I let it knead the dough for about 5 minutes. If the dough is a bit dry, add a little bit of water and if the dough is too wet, add a little bit flour to it.
- Roll out the dough to about 5 mm in thickness. The thinner the ornament the quicker it will dry trough, but you also don’t want it too be too thin and become fragile.
- Get some cookie or play dough cutters to cut out some shapes for your decorations.
- To make the hole to hang the ornament, use a straw to cut the hole in or alternatively get a pencil and poke a hole through.
- Bake for approximately 1-2 hours. If the dough hasn’t dried through bake for another hour. The baking time can vary depending on the size and thickness of the ornaments. Larger and thicker ornaments take longer than smaller thinner decorations.
- Once cooled and completely dried, you can use acrylic paints to paint them. Once dried seal with clear glaze spray before putting glue and glitter on. If you like the cookie look like I do, why not decorate with coloured icing?
Some of you may have noticed, that I have become a bit more interested in living a bit more eco-friendly since the first national lockdown. Due to this, I have decided that from this year on I will be decorating our salt dough decorations with icing and food coloring instead of acrylic paints.
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