Apparently, cinnamon ornaments are a thing. Did you know this? I never heard of them until this year! I guess you bake some cinnamon ornaments, and they leave a warm, cinnamon scent in your home all season long. No kidding! A friend mentioned them to me, so I went online and perused cinnamon ornament recipes.
Most of the recipes call for glue. I settled on the simplest recipe I found by McCormick: just applesauce and cinnamon. You can find that recipe right here. I worried it wouldn't hold as well without glue, but ours worked perfectly.
I combined the 3/4 cup of applesauce with the entire 4 ounce container of cinnamon. I mixed it with a spoon first to get the cinnamon moist, and then Oliver used the Kitchenaid mixer (he loves that thing) to get it mixed well. We rolled it out between two pieces of wax paper.
Oliver helped me use a cookie cutter to cut out shapes. I made a hole for the ribbon before removing the cookie cutter so the hole wouldn't warp the shape of the ornament. Because I worried the dough was fragile, I transferred each ornament to the baking sheet before removing the cookie cutter.
We got 9 ornaments out of a batch. I baked them at 200 degrees for two and a half hours. After the first hour and a half, I flipped them to make sure they dried evenly. The house smelled incredible as they baked! I threaded them with some ribbon and hung some over the back door and some on the tree.
Oliver loves any excuse to use the mixer. These were fun! I think they'll be an annual tradition in our household. We left them as is this year, but, next year, if Oliver is more crafty, we'll decorate the ornaments with glitter glue. Martha Stewart's website has some beautiful cinnamon ornaments decorated as birds. You can find them at this link. Hers are definitely too intricate for my family this year, but maybe we'll give that a try in another decade or so!
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