Every year I try and have an ornament that the kids make for their Nonna as her Christmas gift from them. I am not sure how anyone knew about such things before Pinterest though right? I mean there's only so many ideas but then Pinterest is like bam! Ideas times a million. There's also the difficult task of finding ornaments that go with my mother's decor. The basement tree is mostly blues and silvers and her main event living room tree is mainly white and red. She can afford to be picky I guess. Anyways so peppermint candy ornaments seemed just the ticket!
You need:
Metal cookie cutters
Wax paper
Peppermint candies (I kept the green and white for myself)
Preheat the over to 325. Line a baking sheet with wax paper and spray cooking spray on it, then place the cutters on the wax, having also sprayed them. This is a sticky business for sure. I would recommend trying one before doing an entire batch just to figure out the length of baking time or which cookie cutters even work because some did not, like that star there. It broke twice. I ended up baking for 4.5 minutes. That was the sweet spot.
Remove from the oven then and cool. Obviously you touch those cookie cutters and ouch. I had read to try using a toothpick to make a hole for ribbon but I found that that really didn't work out too well because the hole kept closing.
I also found the wax paper stuck to the back of the ornament. Oh well. See also the candy would seep out under the cookie cutter. This wasn't a big deal though it just broke off pretty easily in my hands.
Then I used my hot glue gun to glue twine to the back and done!
Now we just need to figure out how to make them last for future Christmases...Sealer? Any ideas?
Also, Letty's Girl Scouts Troop did this the other night and they broke some candies down to "fill in" around the solid candies and that just worked so much better. The candy didn't even need to melt very much and so they were thicker and less fragile. Anyways something to keep in mind.
