Homemade Salt Dough Decorations (inc Tutorial)

I wanted to have a go at these last year but time ran away with me! It's such a traditional craft that puts me in mind of the autumn harvest festivals at church when I was little. But I think salt dough lends itself to all sorts of things. (Loads more info here) It's kind of like a store cupboard Fimo!

For the Salt Dough You'll Need: 2 cups of Plain Flour, 1 cup of Table Salt, 1 cup Water (cool but not cold). Mixing bowl, rolling pin, cookie cutters,  palette knife, baking tray, greaseproof paper, cooling rack.
You can mix up any amount of dough you like as long as you stick to this ratio. 2 parts flour to 1 part each of salt and water.

Method: Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. Make a well in the centre and pour in a little of the water and mix. Keep adding the water a little at a time, (You may not need all of the water) & mix until it starts to form a dough. Then squeeze, knead & roll in your hands until it's a smooth, pliable ball of dough.

Lightly flour your work surface and rolling pin and roll out the dough to about 50mm thickness. Cut out shapes using cookie cutters, or freehand if you're a bit more skilled than I am. I left the surface of my shapes plain as I'm going to paint them. But I guess at this stage you could carefully etch patterns or designs into the surface.

Carefully lift your shapes, using a palette knife, onto a baking sheet covered in greaseproof paper. (A couple of my stars got stuck because I didn't flour my work surface properly). Punch out holes for hanging ribbons. (I used a sturdy drinking straw for this)

Bake in the oven for an hour on a low heat (say 60C) turning them over half way through. Then turn them out onto a wire rack and leave until completely cool.  Leave for another 24 hrs before painting or varnishing, which hopefully we shall be doing this weekend....

Holiday Treat Box

Whether you call them biscuits or cookies, they'd sure look cute in a holiday treat box like this one:



They're simple and inexpensive to make. Here's a video tutorial:



I've got a few other ideas for wrapping treats on my blog too, but this is by far my favorite.

Yuletide offerings

Greetings fellow crafty ones and thank you Tilly for starting this excellent blog up!  Im Molly from Molly and Mango and crafting it up this year for yule will be going via the home baked goodies route!



 A couple of years ago, I sent round Rich Fruit Cakes wrapped in festively red muslin cloth, which were immensely successful (although I had trouble convincing a few people I had really made them!) so when the Molly-Porn arrived last month (aka the Lakeland Catalogue), I was inspired by their several pages of homemade christmas cookies and chocolates to do festive cookies for family and friends. I especially like the idea of these jewel trinket biscuits:

They featured a lot of great shaped cutter sets and silicone cases but when I went to one of their stores to buy, none of what I wanted was in stock yet, boohoo Lakeland. (That said I picked up 30 poinsetta cellophane gift bags for £2.50)  So a good friend tipped me off about TK Maxx and I found not only did they have a massive range of christmas cookie cutters but they were a fraction of the price of Lakeland. Last week I found a version of Lakeland's star tree cookers in Tiger (the latest Scandinavian high street import) for just £1.

And the luck didn't stop there... I love the traditional Gingerbread house and this time of year, kits are everywhere, but I wanted to build them from scratch so I dismissed those.  Then I found two great kits at TK Maxx containing just cutters which seemed like a great way to speed up the process and so this year's treats for the specials will be Gingerbread Houses after all (and filled with cookies!).  I'm about to start testing out recipes, so if anyone has any recommendations, I would love to hear them.

And if you want to make your own Gingerbread House, check out this amazing blog, Sweetopia, to get your creativity flowing.  I came across this site while looking for inspiration for icing my cookies, and when the royal icing tutorial featured owl cookies foremost, I knew I'd found the place!  Who could resist these details:

      details

More on the gingerbread houses here.

Looking forward to sharing pics with you and seeing what you have all been making!  All the happiness of the season to you and yours.